The ghosts of buildings slip past me like shadows.

Abandoned by forgotten lives, left empty by the dead.

Stripped bare by bitter dereliction,

Their lonely corpses huddle together in the darkness,

With nothing left to show who gave them life

But the stains of mortality on the last shreds of wallpaper

Clinging like desiccated skin to the old bones

Of our city’s ancestral ossuary.

Again, you can see where a copy of this poem was originally posted in central Manchester, UK. The patterning of bricks on the wall is from the chimney flue of the neighbouring recently demolished property.