City Music I

One of those buildings
that you’re never quite sure what it’s for.
Offices, probably,
but then there are those art projects
filling the ground floor rooms,
the paintings pinned to the windows.
A college? Night classes?
You’ll never know now,
because the insides have been sucked dry,
those windows shattered in a frozen wave
of sea-coloured shards around the perimeter,
as though the builders have picked up the building,
taken it and shaken it, tapped it
like a sheaf of news against the ground.
The outside layer has been stripped off,
leaving strange hollows
and a dangling dancer’s jewellery of metal
that rings like bells in the wind.
What it was is lost,
but just for now it is a performance,
a musical improvisation of metal and air.