These Streets

A Poem by Bryony Kate

I suck. Based off the lyrics from Paolo Nutini's song, These Streets.

As soon as you step across that final border it’s like entering an entirely new world. I don’t like this one so much as my own. You can’t run across the empty streets, run across fields and jump over logs. You wait as an eternal string of cars pass before you, you cross in uniform with a million other people, each with their own needless stresses, their own pointless worries. You see them run. They don’t run across fields, they run between meetings and appointments. Between concrete blocks that attack the sky. You see them weave past the homeless and totter over rubbish. After trundling onto the train, there is no polite conversation just judging glares the lingering smell of piss.

The children smile as they shuffle between each other, no open space and barely room to stretch their tiny arms. Half a pack of cigarettes remains wedged in my pocket, though the change I had there seems to have disappeared. I'll get used to it someday, the ridiculously long street names and ridiculously large crowds. It’s not like home and I don't like it so much. There is less trees, but no less beauty. It just takes a different form in The City.

In The City, the beauty lies in the girl’s eyes as she smiles at the man she will someday marry. It lies in the laugh of the child watching a street entertainer pull handkerchiefs from his pockets. Beauty is found within the sweeping silhouettes of the birds that soar higher than the buildings, soaring over The City.

Beauty can be found even in the most unlikely situations.