The endless light.

The shift of a thousand bodies

crying laughing fucking.

Hot airless corridors strip lit

and prison-like.

They huddle over their

guilty cigarettes,

hounded out into the bleak

dampness

to shuffle their feet

through wet leaves,

inhaling the warm laundry air

pumped through a vent

and into their smoke-blackened lungs.

Will the last vestiges of detergent,

clinging to infinite molecules of moisture

cleanse those

feeble organs, or be rejected with the cool clean air,

to be scattered,

a pollutant?

Would that I were away,

dissolved in vapour,

a mere shimmer in the heavy air.

My ceiling hums with the very life that fills this place.

As if too many heartbeats

have synchronised,

giving up just one pulse.

I put a finger to my wrist,

and count off the beats

to the rhythm of banging doors,

racing footsteps,

coughs and futile curses.