The City Feels Like An Old Friend At Midnight

Sometimes in the dead of the night, when the busy bustling streets go awfully quiet,
you can see a city change right before your eyes…

The #poem

Have you ever stayed awake
so late into the night
that you have seen a city,
drop its veil of pretense and change
right before your eyes?

When the always busy, bustling streets
go awfully quiet,
and that once strange unfriendly city
now seems like an old friend,
who always feels like home
no matter, how many years pass you by…

Ask me, for I know…

One summer,
I lived alone in a room by a busy city street
where every day
I would perch myself on the window, 
hoping to catch the mid afternoon breeze.

I would then carefully study the faces
of the people passing by,
just doing my job as a writer, 
looking for characters for my new story.

But no matter how hard I tried,
I could never tell the people apart;
they all looked the same to me

with those deep furrows on their foreheads,
always rushing about,
running a secret race
about which, no one ever informed me.


Bored,
I would go inside
and wait for the clock to strike midnight.

Because when the streets went quiet,
that's when those strange characters came alive.

The lone woman under the streetlight,
shouting at her lover,
or maybe she was a prostitute,
fighting with a customer.

Drunk men singing and dancing
in that awful summer heat;
suddenly a fight would break out
and they would throw punches in the air
right in the middle of the street.

Young boys performing stunts on their bikes
would go round and round
before taking a bad tumble and hitting the ground.

The same drunk men and that woman
would stop everything
to help the boys get back on their feet,
and then again they would start
the fighting and shouting,

resuming the secret show
they were putting on
only for me.

Others called them a nuisance
for they disrupted their sleep,

but those long summer nights
as I sat all alone in my room,
they seemed like long lost friends
keeping me company.

I used to wonder
where they disappeared during the day;
maybe they tidied up
and pretended to be normal,
just to join in on the secret race.

For they were the outcasts,
the losers, the misfits that no one cared to see.

How strange it is then that, 

that summer they became so special to me.

For you see,
no matter how boring my days were,

they at least made sure with all the screaming,
the silly stunts, the drama,
and those crazy fights,

never once that summer
did I ever have a
dull or lonely night.


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