´óÏó´«Ã½

You are in the dark;

and whatever it takes

we will keep you there,

against our will.

Ìý

We have black-out curtains

to block stray light,

moments when we play along

with your midnight words.

Ìý

The danger comes

from lightningÌý

flashing across your memory,

illuminating your despair

Ìý

when you seem to know

that the world

has draped you

in its shadow.

ÌýÌý

These brief moments,

leave you lonely in their wake

whilst we, the enlightened,

pray for night.

Ìý

The moon is a low pink swingboatÌý

scooping its way through the racing clouds.

Ìý

Hail calls at my window

with its hurled handfuls of grit.

Ìý

I would like love, not this cold caller,

to come tapping at my window.

Ìý

I have laid out my loneliness tonight

like a street vendor with nothing to lose,

voice lost in the whirling of indifferent crowds.

Ìý

I want to be held close under the swingboat moon

till my sluggish juices run again

and my heart rushes to meet

a fuller life.

ÌýÌý

But the old pine

is snagging the moon in its arms,

tossing its head indignantly,

flinging down showers of needles

to prick and criss-cross

the dark, obdurate earth.

Ìý

The mess, the waste, the jumble, the endlessÌý

hassles and glitches, the phased or fizzled out,

the fretting, the punctured, the doubts, the anguish,

the entire dismal pug-ugly business. From this

out of something like a front door

a man. The morning

must be early or winter and still dark, but he is here

out the gate, from the wretched

not exactly awake but a start,

showered, shaved and nicked, awoken

nobody, not yet spoken, relieved at the slow progress –

the milk float, the zigzag of a paperboy

though the light our man makes now

is not match to cigarette

but the screen of a phone which he checks and taps,

the blue dot on a satellite map moving on foot

onwards from one bleak mood to this –

feels a little fresh, he says

to no-one but himself

under his breath, a release.