The Beginnings

I wake to garlands of rubbish around my throat; faded crisp packets, sweet wrappers; torn plastic bags, blue but transparent; scuffed plastic bottles, their rims smeared with fetid gunk. I lay, prone, amongst this, as if I’ve been tipped from a rotting bag of household waste. And in a way, I have been.
My clothes are soiled and stained. I wake to another day.
I run a grimy finger along split gums and broken teeth, a gift from the fighting days. Extricate myself from beneath rain-soaked bushes as if I were strawberry milkshake flowing through a straw: one fluid movement. A shadow cast of reminiscence falls across my mind. My favourite flavour, smell: strawberries.
Looking up at the decaying teeth of 60’s architecture. Waking up to a sky that’s always crying, to a population unforgiving; to a place that’s always dark, even before it stumbles into a back alley, before it's sodomised and brutalised by society’s effluent: the homeless, the pimps, the silent killers.
I am the walker. I am the watcher. I document it all. I am invisible, but I am omnipresent.
Not that you’d ever want to meet me.