At the Party
by Jonathan Garfinkel

At the party the men smoked blue Nil cigarettes.
They discussed capitalism’s collapse: banks close, people riot,
the poor continue to rot. 

I fell asleep mid-sentence.
You were telling me about Spandau –
the old city streets no one bothered to name, only numbered,
the roads that end looking out at nothing.

I dreamt I was on my knees eating earth. Slugs. Ash.
The rusted rebar of abandoned projects. Beside me
lonely tractors, their insides gouged out ­– decades of abuse.
Somewhere a radio played hatred and mistrust, the shattered
brotherhood of man.

When I awoke I saw the future in the corner of the room.
A road slowly curling in the wings of so much cigarette.
The city approaching, everything over.
Shoes, millions of shoes, walking everywhere,
belonging nowhere,
glowing like so many lights
over Alexanderplatz.