Caught in the lamplight
At the end of the day
I scribble out pages
I never could say
There are abstract imaginings
Of flats in the South
With grey patterned curtains
Just keeping lights out
And blow down the coastline
With its turquoise façade
Blow into lifetimes
That are seen from afar
From afar they are seen
And afar they remain
The cursory rust-fall
Of the end of the day
And the end keeps on coming
If you look to your left
And see Death in his seashore
If you’re driving west
And everyone’s grieving
Already bereft
They are caught in the lamplight
Of all that is left
And it is weeds in the suburbs
Cracking up from the ground
Though you’d always thought
That this end of town
Was America, when you were younger
And the town was the Earth
Ah they’d laugh if ever they heard
And this is all linked
Somewhere in my head
And I think of America
All parched and dead
With a camera panned over
And the sky edging closer
And that could repeat forever
Projected on my wall, I imagine it there
My indelible link to the world of the air
And it would release me from holds
Of this temporalness
And I’d float up to it
And lie in its bliss
And this is all kitsch rescued
From lives gone amiss
But it’s been there so long
Perhaps that’s where my life is
Except now I’d take you there
You sail through my head
And sit by my ear
Until I am dead
And there was poison before
Ah but that is near gone
And your face is just left
I forget everyone
You mean more to me now
I’ll travel with you
To those coastal bows
And we’ll always see this curtains grey
The light sinking out of the sunken day
The light, which is not truth
But bitterness
And no in lux veritas
Just cutlery draws lit from above
Oh we’ll see all that, my heart, my love
But with you it will form a murky dream
Like the books that show the forests
That contain the machines
And it rained on those days
And the machines are gone
With the pilots’ lights slow lingering on
When night time comes
The lights are shone
The torches turning the daylight on
And creep over farmyards
Where the cattle belong
And move past the churches
All gothic and grey
And the cemetery and its skulls
Melted in dismay
The killers of children
Just sent a shiver
Ah and would they were sent back
To their soul-giver forever.
There is a Victorian Gothic
That I think of sometimes
Of London, grim, gripped
Ensconced in its crimes
With deathly stares
From deathly black eyes
And death in the streets
And death in the skies
And the buildings are black
And the river runs brown
Flowing away to provincial towns
And the language is coarse
As thought cut from a sack
Folding out sentences
That never fold back.
Ah London, dark child
With sinister gaze,
Who will look on you
‘Til the end of your days?
You: ugly, insouciant,
burning away
You: pitch-ridden, prostrate
lying in haze
Down the Thames it creeps
For it knows the way
And with its one incantation
It quietly says:
“And in darkness it moves still
This life gone askew
And in darkness it moves still
This deathlife in you.”