no death nor glory

go out for a walk in the neighbourhood where i work. during the afternoon, right after lunch, under the rain or the sun. take a puff of a cigarrette and look around you. old buildings, flats piled one on top of another, their structures reminding of an abandoned bee hive, its glass-covered balconies resembling stacked cages. and behind the glass, wraiths. ghosts not yet dead, a shadow of their former glory. abandoned, doomed to a quiet loneliness. no one notices them. no one remembers them. from above, from behind the windows, they stare at the street. they long for the time when they could walk those sidewalks of cobblestone or ride the tram in a sunny day. they long for their years of strenght, of well-being, of health - they long for their lives, for the glory of them, stuck in despair in their prisons of glass. haunted, haunting the ones oblivious to their fates.