Mass Transit
City arisen from a beat-down by villains and despots
Wounds unhealed, but scabbing highrise tinted glass
City of two million in ’74 –two thousand in ’78
Lonely omegamen huddled in dark closets, Anne Franks all,
listening for the sound of boots, rifle bolts, and evil
S-21 ghosts hum and whisper down the barbed-wire mesh
Screams, now just visceral reverberation and goose-flesh
Dusty streets never wash clean in the afternoon downpours
that sluice and fall through the tarps and bags filling gaps
between crazy-quilt corrugated tin roofing the Russian market
The market is a labyrinth of narrow paths, smelling of metallic meat,
reeking durian, and the fish that finally gave up flapping gills
no longer laboring to live on that thin, ephemeral air
The people, the survivors, kept breathing that thin, ephemeral air.
Micro-Writing 