Stank

The Stank on the Corner

When the rain pours down the city’s pale‑grey streets,
a damp hush settles over every false‑wood corner.
The black‑clad lorry’s exhaust hisses, giving its
domestic catharsis to the air that already knows how
to keep a secret: the stank‑that‑runs‑slow beneath each step.

There in the alley, beneath a half‑tapped footpath lamp, the smell of a forgotten yog‑talu—
a pot of poni stew mingles with the rotting old mush
of a tram‑bused potato‑sack. It drips onto the slick kerb.

The foot soldiers of the scent move in bands of
faint brown, winding among the cigarette butts—
the percussion of collective sighs, the blasphemous
thrum of nightlife clinging to the pavement.

The stank, though none see it, is a quiet Vicar’s sermon,
hand in hand with the pub’s lamp, whispering that beneath every neon, every grocer’s sign, there lies a bone‑deep London, thick and unbowed.

“To whistle it,” the bus‑keeper says, “means to learn the melancholy language of this concrete, old stone city. Here, odor is just another part of the proper soul. We call these things the ‘stank’, as we call a boy in his first summer: a moment to be introduced, to be reckoned with, politely and firmly yet with a twinkle in the eye.”

In those moments the “stank” is not merely a repellent but a mentor: reminding the traveller that even the strongest Londoners (sir, madam, any soul in the Great British we still taste but never truly deny).
It is that frayed love: fragrant or not, it beckons us to peer beneath the surface, to find, perhaps,
in the very smell, the last breath of tomorrow.