When I tire of the wellness trade,
chafe at cut-price comfort,
then consent becomes a bomb
exploding inward. I would walk alone,
shake off dreary pleasantry.
For discontent must be there
even in the streets of heaven.
Beyond 24-hour convenience
night thickens in alleyways –
it is the landscape I must tread.
A mask in every pocket,
shadow no longer set by sun.
Air cools to its dew-point numbness.
Nose-to-tail the cars stand guard –
there’s a tinted windscreen
shattered like an asterisk.
I get around these vagrant roads
by cutting corners, taking
a straight line always
across the sleepless labyrinth.
Under the pavement, hidden hills
and buried water courses.
Striplight flickers through the pupil
of a window. My eye watching.
x. 2022
This was a troublesome beast to wrestle into this shape, where I’m happy (not so say relieved) to leave it. It comes from a prompt – Pablo Neruda’s ‘Walking Around’ [https://allpoetry.com/Walking-Around].
ReplyDeleteI wasn’t sure how to respond, other than wanting to use some startling imagery, as Neruda does. The nightwalker is a persona I’ve explored before and was half-conscious of drawing on that sense of transgression and unease. But melodrama aside, I had little notion where exactly I wanted to go.
It took the input of two workshops [much thanks to the Kevin Higgins’ gang and BSE’s own Poetry Aloud posse] and several tortured drafts to tease out my thinking. Whether it was worth the effort is for the reader to judge!