The home that is Athens.

I am the city.
The great mother of countless lives and countless deaths -and that occasional void of all that linger in between.
I stretch my sick and timeless body across the cancerous earth, and hurt and blister and infect its stillness with raw motion.
In feverish persistence, I spread my acrid dominion across space and time -a universe of expendable heartbeats.
Where I begin, every departure seizes -and where I stand, every arrival ends.

I am the cage on whose bars you cling in gratitude.

Beneath my toxic ground, a zillion pale white things are seeded; once breathing brightly as the next.
Oh, the dead of every kind are the dew of my soul -the living, they merely tickle my lips.
Through asphalt arteries I spread my law, through cement windowed teeth I bite the sky
I stretch my arms made of smoke and noises around the clarity of the world and spit within the carbon chaos. Floor after floor I swallow the clouds, one hundred billion elevators claw the heavens down.

Whenever I wake, the sun goes to sleep; whenever in slumber, everything sighs.

Nothing loves the City, because it is the greatest pause before the rest of every suffering thing
And nothing hates the City, because to pause is to postpone -and everything dies.

I, the city. I'm built on broken needles and gas canisters, I feed on rotting pigeons and blocked sewers.
My skin diseases are the lovers on the benches and the candies falling from the children
But in the end, my founding vow prevails, all Life succumbs to me and there is nothing I cannot devour.
I, the gray goddess, have my saints, the pedophiles and rapists and all the harmful urban creatures that feed on my momentum.
I have my thousand apostles, the veinless junkies spreading the message of their spasms and the homeless hungry children
That spread the message of a stallion bitch whose leash I am: Death -on an endless diet until the final madness synchronizes step.
I have my hooveless cattle on the ready, massaging me with heels and tires and knees -ever worshiping their senseless mother.
My heart is your sorrow on the midnight bus, your eyes made of emptiness when you board the subway
Your reason when you rape your daughter, your method when you abandon your child
Your courage when you live and let die, your certainty when you murder emotions.

You don't love me, for I am the ground on which you stain your hands with all the shit your kind is modeled upon.
You don't hate me, because you would do anything, for just a second further and
I am just this fucking second further.

I am the city. Before all alphas and omegas, I'm of the ancient Time and modernized End
The nail and cross of obsolescent gods and devils;
I am your very mother and her rapist, killer, eater, shiter, neverminder too.
In my lungs babies die and old men stretch their arms upon your sister
Young bipeds beat to death their fading, helpless kindred for the banknotes I shit when I digest your dreams.
Brothers end each other, all in the name of expiring power, all beneath my streetlights
The streetlights that make me look yellow and gleaming, like that whore that your father visits on Sundays.

I am the city. I am all that is evil and endless and wrong
And they all happen again and again every moment
Down the alley, round that corner, in that room, in your head
All the graveyards and asylums of the world are piled in my lungs
And are fired in your every day each time I exhale
And you can't afford to know how they're piled each time I inhale.

I am the fucking city that you drool upon. You were born in my lap and back here you will perish
All the loved ones you've known will be buried in me disrespectfully
All the worthless ones will succeed through the munching of bones of great men
I am the city and my soul is the hospital faces that are embossed on the hard bed's finality
I am the city and my eyes are the headlights of trucks when the breaks are not working
I am the city -my voice is the voice of sirens and ambulances and my silence is your speechless pain
I am the city -my breath is the one that should come after your final one
I am the bloody city and you'd fuck me if you could, bite me and eat me and go freely insane
At one burning instant and at once
And not tick after tick after tick after tick
Of my clocks that dictate your service to me.

I am the city, and you make me this way every day
You don't love me nor hate me
For we're made of each other.