I walked past a homeless man, a derelict human being with deep lines cut into his forehead as he slept on a fractured sidewalk beneath a blue, threadbare tarp that snapped sharply in the breeze.

I quickened my pace, shuffling between the broad shoulders of two abandoned buildings looming over me, their skin of cracked brick and broken glass an echo of possibilities negated and forgotten.

I glanced upward.

There they were.

There they had been.

Hovering high above me as silent witnesses to the muted madness far below.

Photograph and Prose copyright Mike Yost 2016