Summer In The City

This year's May ultimately unmasks last year's August as the deceptive and shamelessly lying crook it turned out to be.

While the ones' name promised joys of summer, making merry in the greenest of meadows and frolicking in the sun, it let the heavens pour at leisure instead, sucking all the colour from the sky, crowning weary mountain tops with unwanted caps of snow, reintroducing cardigans to an audience dying for the tiniest leftovers from a memory of warm and sunlit childhood summer afternoons.

The other - proud, loud and self-assured in the glistening sunlight - is far ahead of its time, blinds you with over-exposed imagery, belies its ancestral place and mocks the changing of the seasons with its overheated temperament, wanting to be top dog in a summer yet to come.

I look down on crooked rooftops as they simmer in the brightly burning afternoon sun. The heat parades triumphantly through streets, leans on terraces, lingers on squares, and invades the most private, hidden corners of the city.

Dehydrated tourists stagger aimlessly through winding cobblestone alleys like drugged lab rats through a maze. Water spills from a bottle and evaporates before it hits the ground. Steve McQueen completely loses his cool. A pigeon lights up like a match as it lands on the hot tin roof. I scatter its ashes across the concrete below, while a premature summer laughs in the rotting face of winter's corpse.