Martha

I stand here pissing in this narrow shithole of a toilet,
staring up through the little slit of a window at a sky the colour of a dead man’s face.
little worms of light wriggle across my vision—
cheap vodka and cheaper dreams doing their slow dance in the bloodstream.
it smells like the inside of a lung that gave up years ago,
mixed with that sweet rot of damp and the sharp sting of mothballs
drifting up from God knows where—
like my grandmother’s drawers when I was a kid,
full of yellowed letters nobody ever answered.
the wall’s black with soot
and the ghosts of a thousand underground trains are coughing their lungs out all night on the northern line below.

scrawled on the tiles —

“For a good time, call Martha 083-2791903.”

another desperate lie in this concrete tomb,
where drunks dream of cheap salvation.
the Sunday-evening train shunts hard beneath me,
a low iron groan that rattles my bones
and sounds almost like mercy in my drunk skull.
the cistern keeps dripping its tired little song,
steady as a pulse you don’t want to feel anymore.

I shake off, zip up, rinse the piss and the day off my hands under water the colour of weak tea, and walk back to the bar where the same bastards are still pretending tomorrow won’t come.

fingers dial the code,
Martha’s silence echoes deep,
call again someday.