Street Sleep Walking Edit 1 milo, billy, brownlie,leanne et al.

[tectak]

I think this poem has some compelling imagery but there is some stuff that can be cut.

The stench of dark colonic wynds, city-black alleys of waste,
esconce and shelter the vile and the fallen.--Esconce? Did you mean ensconce?
They are sack-wrapped and bagged, societal garbage, asleep in a trance -- I would get rid of societal garbage it is too much of a qualitative judgment.
of blank syringed days. Wet and decayed, with their blood-threatened bodies,
they are chilled into comas of hidden despair. -- Coma of hidden despair, what would that look like?

Look quickly and side-wise into shadows, where but for the darkness -But for the darkness reads awkwardly.
could be seen in their eyes, tears of gratitude; assaulting vistas,
threaten by closeness to you and your kind, so that distance becomes
the shield, the protection. Do not linger or look on the lost or their lives
but walk in your sleep, and sleep like the blind.

Listen! Hear lungs, through crackling congestion, broken by silence
of Death on the prowl. They live on their highway, glass-broken, tin-rattled,
cat-littered, flesh-rotted, waste-strewn and piss-sodden. --Too many descriptors in my opinion.
Enuresis dreams in each tossing bundle; deaf or dead, the unheeded prod.
So sleep-walk my beauties, 'til the wakening call.

Tectak
2012

Hi brownlie,
you have got to the nub of what irritates me about this piece. I wrote it after a particularly depressing visit to Middlesbro back in the late 90's and did a rewrite about a year back...there was a tv documentary on the very estate I had been working in. I had a computer nicked first time round and against police advice went back at night to try to talk to the locals with a view to its return. Long story. I got it back but needed the police to get involved. The first thing I wrote on it was this. It irritates me BECAUSE it shows my bias....I was judgemental.
ensconced it is....I have read the original and it was correct. Unforgivable typo...I should have spotted it. Good catch.
I think you make a good point on the diatribe towards the end. I will cut it.
Best,
tectak

I would stick to an unbiased description of the abject members of society, though with your title it could just be about sleep walking. My two cents, obviously it is your poem.