The day bleeds out.
We really don’t know what to do.
The clock tower has told the same time for a hundred years.
The jackdaws spiral. Spring
from a spine of brittle winter trees.
Altogether. Electro-convulsed.
Life. A long random series of shock treatments.
They’re all a’ japes. Scruffy jacketed comrades
catching a collective cold.
Darkness descends. The day’s crypt.
One street leads up. The other down.
Evening’s High Noon.
All front doors are shut.
They’ll always be locked in your life.
Always barred for the final showdown.
We wander to the crumbling castle,
looking like a half-eaten wedding cake.
Lover, where did all the party guests go?
Surfeit of stars. Increase in the night stream.
Betelgeuse blinging-it,
winks out a warm orange strobe.
Would we be happier there?
The whole finger-pointed asterism,
a starfish stuck, no thrown, to Carmarthen’s cellar ceiling.
We head home from our late hour saunter.
The bed cast up, also thrown,
waits wantonly, a flotsam raft
from what went down,
and the two of us,
our lone lives now, strangely surfaced.
NOVEMBER 2018 Paul Deaton MONK
