H2O Recycled

She wipes garish makeup from her lips
because she's stoned,
a loner in the silent metropolis.
She flushes me down fauces,
labyrinths man conceals
in a maze of urban paradoxes,
forgetful of my sacred heritage.

Unreal age, rush and noise of city days:
Mums and lunch-hour dawdlers
unroll synthetic mats on grass
to broil their skin with U.V. rays,
sacrificial beasts on beer-can altars.

I’d not go willingly into bowels
of doomed cities, palaces, taverns.
Gravity pulls me down hollows,
now and then a glimpse of sidewalks
above, of homeless snoring
on thresholds, legs curled mindlessly
over iron gratings.
I spy a yellowish glow: a wedding-ring. Yours?
Your mascara was streaked with tears.

Flowing past tattered socks, foul jeans,
smegma of mangy bodies, cats,
I hear squeals of mating rats
slinking in gutters, climbing and falling
swish swish swish
into my sludge to reach the sea.

A shoe-sole gasps, taps
my oily edge, and is toppled over by a toad.
Chemically treated, H2O recycle mode,
I'm dumped in reservoirs and left to brew.
Breezy dawns spell hope,
I swirl into realms of heavenly hues.
Another Sisyphus, I must start over,
pushing not a rock but mammoth turbines
for city lights and miracles of your tap water.