Growing up,
I quickly learned to ignore the shadows of my cities
Shadows that:
lived under the overpasses
ran by the railways
begged in the traffics.
I was taught to lever look the shadows in their eyes.
“They prey on innocence,” I was told.
“As soon as you look into the shadows
they will creep into your lights.”
So I looked away, into the lights of my cities
while my trains sped past their slums
my buses sped past their shanties
And my life sped past our cities of shadows.
And then when I came to live in the cities of lights
Where the shadows are kept at bay
With massive floodlights at the borders
I came to realize that
The shadows that I despised
Growing up,
were never shadows at all.
They were darknesses
of my blind spots and guilts,
projected outwards.