A poem a week for 2012 - a record of a year in the life of...

Two Cities...World's Apart




Early morning rays shaft polluted atmosphere, piercing a waking dawn,
as pedlars don rough suits; load rickety trucks for the two day trudge
across their city, to market. Following their ancestors' traditions.


Livestock loaded; poultry piled, legs tied, squarking, all the while less enthusiastically, towards catatonia; over parched dusty roads. On their way to certain death.


Caskets and cases of exotic fruits and vegetables, lovingly tended under protective tunnels, breathe filthy air.  Lose glow.  Gain grimy film of city-stain.  Each mile reducing yuen value on this cross-town pilgrimage for survival.



Mile after mile of rural aspect gives slowly to greater urban sprawl.  Homeless beggars wander municipal parks at midday, shuffling restlessly between monuments to great City men whose stone visages provide little comfort -  except to the pigeons;  disrespectful, ubiquitous, grey.

By late afternoon, sun fractured steel and glass glistens through tainted ether, where villages, towering skywards, draw far-flung commuters into myriad conurbations, vying for space with clamouring businesses, niching any available nook - mocking planned expansion and laughing at crafted landscapes.



Street vendors serve the steady stream of exhausted itinerants as they journey homeward after paying homage; some to Mammon others to existence; both fatigued, they travel the life blood arteries slashing the city; passing squats; eyeing mansions; surveying municipal gardens where hired dog-walkers balloon their charges over course amenity grass, bordered by heady scented, dusty orchids, hibiscus, lilies.




Public art, sitting in greying isolation, forgotten  commissions of momentary populism, nods its head in approval as dusk approaches, sighs on settling evening routines. 


The tentacles of Chongqing City - a sprawling - poorly defined home to thirty million, pull in the pedlars to the quietude of sleeping streets as moonrise  declares rest-time under canopied carts, before the final day into the heart of the metropolis, the epicentre of commerce, the harvest store of what's not the world's largest city.

-----

Across the world, another story of struggle for survival sits equally awkwardly, as a man famed for a day -olympian of TV quiz show - hurls himself noiselessly off a multi-storey car park in anther grey city. 


 All those brains, unable to fathom life.

Is CHONGQING the world's biggest city? - BBC News - 29/01/12

Quiz champion killed himself day after winning episode on Eggheads - Telegraph - 21/01/12