A city after dark turns into a wilderness in this untitled poem, and the reader is walked in before there is time to object. The opening word, "Entering", has no subject attached, so the speaker's "I" drops away and the reader steps into its place. What we enter is "the industrial world of the concrete", a phrase that turns a building material into a whole territory. Nothing in the lines that follow is gentle.
The central idea is that night strips the city down to appetite and fear, and that the resulting test of courage belongs to the reader. The key word is "hungry", and it keeps coming back. The drunk laugh like "hungry hyenas", the ghouls are "hungry for a midnight snack", the cats are "desperate for every morsel", the killers are "power-hungry", and their crimes "blood-thirsty". Hunger links everything on the street, from drunks to cats to criminals, and only the scale changes, from a scrap of food to a stolen life. That ladder from morsel to murder is the poem's quietly alarming logic.
Most of the poem is heard rather than seen, which suits the dark. There are "cackles", "screeches", "howls", and finally sirens. The similes are drawn from the animal world: hyenas, wolves, ghouls. The sirens are the most interesting case. They are meant to signal rescue, yet they "howl like wolves", which puts them in the pack. The next line, "Predators, searching for victims", doesn't say whether the predators are the sirens or the criminals. Read either way, nothing on this street is safe.
Light is handled with just as much care. The windows of the tall buildings throw "artificial light", which exposes "every imperfection on their ugly faces". Giving the buildings faces makes the light feel like an interrogation lamp rather than a comfort. Then comes "A golden harvest moon", which "towers over the concrete streets". The verb is borrowed from the skyscrapers, so the moon competes with them, and "harvest" is a farming word dropped into a place with no crops. The next line, "The only natural light to be seen", is short and isolated, like the moon itself. Judging by the surrounding vocabulary of hunger and taking, "harvest" may also quietly join the poem's language of things being gathered up and consumed.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its shape does the work that rhythm might otherwise do. The early lines are long and heavy, and the third stretches to hold its whole accusation. After "Was that a pair of eyes?" the lines shorten and the description gives way to doubt. "Or just an illusion" has no question mark, and whether or not that was deliberate, it leaves the line hanging in a way that suits the uncertainty. Then the poem turns on the reader with "But tell me this". "Cold and alone" is the first moment of physical feeling in the poem. Everything before it is observed from outside, and here the reader is put into the body of the person on the street.
The poem has rough edges. "Howl" and "night" are repeated often, "whom stalk" is a grammatical slip, and hyenas, wolves and ghouls are familiar monsters. Yet the familiarity may be the point, since the poem borrows the stock figures of horror stories to make a city street feel like one.
The poem is signed only with a username, and nothing is given about when or why it was written, so it is best judged as it stands. Its significance lies in the turn at the end. For fourteen lines the reader is a safe observer of other people's hunger, and the last line removes that safety. "Would you be brave?" is never answered, and the poem can't answer it for you. Being left alone with the question is what lingers after the howling stops.