We spit, piss and shit
and flush and bleach the tiles,
scrub the evidence—the blood, the milk,
the sweat, the faeces that tells us
we are meat and going off.

We cross the street around the man who smells
of what we might become (an unwanted prophecy),
and look away from his festering wounds,
the way we look away from mirrors
when something animal stares back.

But the eyes still linger, don’t they,
dragged curiously to the pitiless street,
to the stain, the rot, the macabre,
the soft thing hit at the roadside,
and we slow down, peering,
as fascination lodges like
bone in the throat of our refinement,
for beneath the fabric, the fashion,
the deportment, the careful way we eat,
the precision of self management,
we know we leak, we curdle,
we expire on soiled sheets
that need to be changed,
and the world does not stop
its indifferent turning from our shame,
from the terror of our own humanity.

 

24/7/2026