A Dormitory Town

 

It registers not a thought as one passes through

an assemblage of stale architecture and dark alleys

Culture and history find no abode here

It wakes before dawn, deserted by day and dormant at night

Its inhabitants eat, drink and sleep in dreary shadows

Seasoned drinkers and smokers manipulate dominoes

with wrinkled faces and bleary eyes

Doorsteps from where the elderly sit and stare

bereft of thought and worn down by irrelevant cares

No meeting place or sense of community

only shiftless souls on a perpetual quest for nought

A book shop full of books never to be read

A pharmacy bristling with business for ageing hypochondriacs

A place of futile activity given to an excess of boredom

and fertile with mundane gossip

No monuments or modest symbols of notoriety

It is a recumbent pasture of humanty´s lost interest

in life with nothing to offer