Construction Time Again

 

Construction Time Again

 

In this city, it’s construction time again.

It was yesterday, it will be tomorrow,

for us it’s all one and the same.

Deployed -  Hyundai 220 mechanical crawlers

that yawn elaborately, bare teeth and bite

deep, ravage this poor sub-soil

of grit, concrete, gravel and spoil –

nothing green grows in such solid grey caliche

never a bush let alone a tree.

You wonder how anything rooted here,

what it destroyed, what it cleared -

that’s me, picking my way between bunkers

screened by poor to middling safety bulwarks,

therefore, anyone intent on tumbling

can only blame themselves – that, the night,

or the heat haze blurring lines of sight.

Avoid murderous traffic, two-fold slayers

who exterior heat to interior cool or flay

your heels alive with spinning tyres

that pitch and toss the dust storms higher

than they’ve any right to be. If I make it –

the jury’s out – I might order coffee, ponder

why the pit outside is dug that deep,

did they remember chemicals to exterminate

the scuttling cockroaches that proliferate

and find nests so easy to build? Once inside

I am besieged by the one fly

who somehow knows and has found me out,

will attack without remorse or any thoughts

for its own survival – I swot without any hope

of success of preventing exit or egress

and wonder if I hung a flypaper throughout

it might certainly lead to my arrest.