City 1

The woman cannot contain her shoe. She shakes it off and frowns. Her shoe is flat-heeled, patent leather and black, its trim gold like the early morning sun. She passes the smoking young men, who stand hunched as if afraid of the city; these men who wear old leather jackets and chequered scarves. None of them are tall; they talk together as the woman in the shiny shoes passes by, as the sun climbs in the sky and the shadows move across the square.

City 2

There are people on the streets early morning young men with the last hope in their eyes and a cigarette between their fingers. They gather in groups on the low wall outside the gallery listening to the traffic and watching the moving shadows.

City 3

The city gathers the people of the lost under its bridges, behind the darkness of buildings and in the places I cannot see. It gathers them at night in its cold, dark cloak and spits them out onto its squares, its pavements and stations for us to hurry by.

City 4

The city is a single magpie, an old church with a clock. Red cranes high in the sky, twenty brick chimney pots, nine satellite dishes, the struts of a railway bridge, the new built on the remains of the old.