Urban Blight

Reflections on urban decay for My Word Contest, 3/20. Second place.

Urban Blight

Someone signs the shopfront,
as though claiming the devastation
or making a bid for immortality.
Either way it seems a strange choice,
to seek authorship of failure,
beyond desperation and struggle,
dreams crushed under the weight
of a communal decline,
or to celebrate the individual,
the separate existence of self
in a place disregarded, ignored,
as though shouting greatness aloud
in a soundproofed room.
Plywood-blanked windows blind
to the passing scene they once reflected,
now brood on nothing but the past,
and the sign speaks of a thrift that
surrendered to a relentless decay
as hope drained in the gutter.
And yet someone signed the shopfront,
each letter bold with the assertion that,
“I’m still here, alive and undefeated.”


Line Count: 22