Anywhere Peachtree

Watch you the ever-rushing stream, feet that sweep and drag across the uneven concrete of indeterminate sidewalks. The feet of workers and lovers, of the whores and the homeless as they chafe the beaten path swallowed so insidiously by glorified shadows of towers. Metal spires and rancid bird-forms compete for control of the skies, and the weary seldom look up to see what man hath wrought--seldom look, and never see.

These downturned eyes watch the very feet that trod confident in selfsame misery toward long predestined locations--uptown, downtown, hometown--claim which place you may, swear upon your land, place bets upon the great re-bar altar and wait for some god's will to mortar the gaps in the philosophy of contradiction. Idiosyncratic and certain creep these gears toward mass amalgamation; the altar grows a mind of its own, and faith so eloquently sworn in light cares naught about the shadows it casts upon the city. Such genuine catastrophe the world has never known--Fat is the lamb for sacrifice, though beneath mounds of wool his form is gaunt and degenerate.

The prostitute is round with child and heavy in labor. She walks through the night and cries for a room, shelter, but most simply, innocently, for warmth. Rain begins to fall. Thunder roars, shakes the city at its foundations; lightning tears through the sky and welds with the woman's birth cries. The child is born wet and bloody upon unforgiving asphalt.

The lowly son of David walks the streets in perpetually assured melancholy. He finds the woman with newborn child and holds her close.
"I have ever been thy friend, sister."
"I am a whore but no fool. I have known your people and they bear no likeness to you."
There she dies, wrapped in the torn white cloths of a bearded savior. He kneels and cradles the newborn with tears streaming quietly down his cheeks, carried with the rain down darkened chasms filled with rotting flesh and buried plastics. Not a soul glances downward--eyes ever directed toward their own feet take no notice of the contrast sitting forgotten in the street, and only the sewers will taste his tears, those last rivulets of innocence and hope drawn away though man's own devices.

The newborn awakens, eyes directed upward at his first clear sight, the glass and steel arched so imposingly over his head.
His tears join the Jew's, and he screams purple-faced for the world that has caged him in and forgotten them both.