Air, on earth as you are in heaven, please nurse
our converted churches. Granite gargoyles
cling on over hipster offices. Our angel statue is trapped
in hallucination, its back turned to rapacious sea.

The pews here are benches for the broken and frazzled
who believe in nothing they cannot clutch or smell:
warm dogs, White Lightning, gnawed chicken legs
forsaken in doorways where death whispers.

Bless us, air, we who linger, exposed to wide-open space
where you swirl after roaming the Atlantic
with your cargo of salt, dust and recycled breath,
unbalancing the crowns of elms not far from shore.

Keep slamming into our faces, down the windpipes
of stoners who kite hazily above their legs,
who kneel in bushes on cruising grounds
while you give yourself without judgment

to council estates where the glows of lone cigarettes
at night are souls drifting; to each corner under bridges
where buskers cry, hypodermics throng; to the flat
where a woman rises from under bath water, gasping.