On Any Street

Introduction

This is for RMS's August Horror Theme Challenge that you can check out here:

A verse from this poem always sticks with me

In the cheap seats where murder breeds
Somebody is out of breath
Sleep is a luxury they don't need
- a sneak preview of death
Belladonna is your flower
Manslaughter your meat
Spend a year in a couple of hours
On the edge of Beasley Street

Dr John Cooper Clarke from "Beasley Street"

On Any Street

His life was gone. He lost his wife, family, house, job and friends. He was alone and 'on the street'. At night he dreamed he was dead, he had no future. He slept under bridges with the other derelicts and drug addicts.

They stopped harrassing him because they could not steal anything from him, but then they started kicking him, and using him as a toliet so he moved on. He looked forward to death, and nothingness, and not waking up to a life of regret and pain.

He moved to another street, but it was just the same. Death could not come soon enough. His dreams were populated with images of himself, they were not dreams, they were nightmares.

Then he slept in black.

He was dead

He thought

He had left his body.

Then he woke up, bruised, bleeding and soaked in urine.

He was alone. The street was empty. The houses were as derelict as him. No birds flew. The sky was low, featureless grey cloud.

He was hungry, but there was no food or even trees or grass.

He walked on. Surely he would find something, but there was nothing in this endless grey world apart from derelict streets.

Eventually he stopped and slept.

He woke up once more abused like he was last time. The day went the same.

He once heard that Hell was just and endless queue, and when you got to the start, you ended up at the back of the queue.

This is what this felt like.

Permanently hungry, each sleep was a death and each morning an abusive resurrection, and feeling more alone than he had ever been.

He could see no way out.

He found some glass shards and cut is wrists and watched the blood pump out. He faded into darkness. He finally thought he had death.

Then he woke again. Same situation. There must be others here to do this to him while he slept, but the street was empty and he was starving. There was no food, and despite the grey clouds there wwas no water, nit even a puddly. In desperation he found a drain cover, but did not bother trying to open it. He could see that even the drains were dry.

All live was gone from this world, apart from him and his tormentors, and he had not seen any sign of them apart from the state they left him in each morning.

He realised that he was in Hell, punished for his sins in life, with no hope of redemption. He saw that he would be dying of thirst and starvation forever, with a slight respite when his mind fell into sleep, although that scared him because he knew what he would wake up to.

Every night he now died, every morning he was resurrected. It would never end.

He thought if he wandered the streets he may find something, but every street was the same and he thought he was just going round in circle.

He had died many times, and was going to die many more times. He was doomed to wander these derelict streets of his own private Hell.