We’ve had a bit of a problem in our block of flats. People keep getting in the communal entrance (which is supposed to be locked) and smoking drugs. The other night (at midnight) it was so bad the thick smoke set the fire alarm off! It inspired this poem…

Another night on my ramshackle estate
As the moon laments this shitty, bitty, gritty town
Its silver veil a smokescreen for the shady underworld
The illicit drugs, the criminals doing their small town dealing
affirming the government statistics
that the wounds that aren’t healing, the budget stealing
in this festering underworld, doing good isn’t appealing.
They said it was safe and secure, my second floor flat
But I beg to differ
With the random riff raff gathered in the foyer below
Smoking, choking themselves into silver plumes of dead aspirations
Coiling around the redundant dreams
Of unrealistic YouTube celebrity expectations
Picking up chicks and pseudo sexual conversations
A sad perpetuation of the failures and fuck ups of generations
Each puff inhaled, the deadening of a painful sensation.

They don’t make much noise, these kids
Maybe their empty voices have little of value to say
Or maybe they’ve learnt that their vacant words are as meaningless as a drug free day
That their song is suicidal, that their record is one that will never play
That the language they speak doesn’t have any colours, just black, white and grey.
And what happened to you, long lost kiddo?
What tattered, shit hand did life deal you so young?
With your fucks and your shits and wankers and twats
And your profanities dripping off your streetwise tongue
An opera in the gangsta hood gone unsung
An invasive cancer on a no hope, blackened, smoke-stained lung.

Playing games with the tragic three little pigs
And the big bad bullshit wolf
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow
And they forgot the house as the blow made their minds slow
As the smoke curls elegantly upwards and flows
And their feelings of detachment grow
And the seeds of futlity and hostility and disability they sow
And where will it all lead, where will it all go?

Another night on my ramshackle estate
With the spliff head kids, always high, always low.

©2020 Sarah Drury