I walk another dollhouse street,
and at the centre of that black desert road
I stand alone.
Sweet houses shrunk away
into their silence,
so they are smaller than my bones
and my breath in the air appears
to hang and hover,
like noxious gas
unmoved in the corpse lane.
The properties are well embalmed
in a serene wax,
they are stiff
like the near-ghosts who totter within.
They shelter the eroded,
those whose lips may as well be sealed
like letters
for all they had to give is ash,
just as they will be soon.
I,
suspended there
am a dead woman too.
There is no lilt in my step-shuffle
no eye-blast grin or spark.
I,
shuddered over there,
as useless as the rest.
In those suburban alcoves
I lay my hands
on to the tepid tarmac,
and in an animal crawl,
I grip it
pleading away my fragmentation
from this choking world.
