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What do you think happens
when you take a lion away from his savannah
Or the tiger taken
from her forest haunts –
do you suppose They go mad?
The skyscrapers of the city loom all around
me, and all of us – surrounded, caged.
Our ancient landscapes nowhere to be found.
Do you think we should not be
climbing the walls?
I don’t think. I, too,
have shambled along the megapolis corridors
Just the same as you.
They begin to look
the same beneath the yoke
of urban smog
Left | right | up | down
the sewered streets more of the same,
Just another path across the bog.
Light is always shining
All around
A wonderful artifice! Untraining
the eye from its natural sun.
Before long they tell you there’s no such thing
As Up,
and there never has been.
Stop trying to climb away,
be cool and say,
there is no Sky to cleanse your eye.
Take your tranquilisers with your own hands, and dance
tricks through the night and day.
Yet in the last edge of sanity the human mind
still peers down the corridors
and wonders, surely there is an end?
Before releasing its final byssal thread
Discovering too late that Up exists
for it can fall Down, into Abyss.
