Poem 01

The brightness of day has broken away from the sky. 

Your step becomes courageous, as it’s courted by the voices of days past, when light drives them under your bed and inside your nightstand, reduced to dissonant whispers and forbidden songs, barely audible under the voices of others... marching, and you watch them go by, with flaming eyes and flaming fingernails, and you have permission to trail behind with little choice but to mime their steps, infernal and inevitable.

And when the streets clear, you have permission to escape the present, and everything is allowed to become something else, dark becomes breathable and sticky, and smells, objects, and words are instead replaced with memories of what they were. 

Memories surround you, an indulgence which doesn’t hold under the scrutiny of daylight, and you wander streets which are not streets, they are the memory of streets that looked different, but were walked by the same legs, and they are lined by buildings that aren’t buildings, but outlines stacked with sleeping dogs, running in their dreams, unawares of each other, their paws scratching at the floors they lie on.

The air is sticky with the dog’s breath, but you breathe in, as it is not air, nor breath, but the warm breeze of a summer’s evening by the sea, salty and liquid like molasses, unhindered by the wave breakers you used to climb.

You make out a flower pot on the side of the not-street, and it holds no flowers, but beer bottles left by someone who drank them as night fell, waiting to be emptied by the invisible hands of someone who promised to take the bottles away, as long as they were hidden. 

Sometimes the streets turn in on themselves and around the corners, sometimes they turn above themselves, and other times under their own corners, which are different but in the same space. They sharpen into a spire, and you’re walking on the side of it without realising that you’ve left the ground behind your back.

But by then you know that the spire is not a spire, but a beach dotted with seashells, and in every seashell there is a house, and in every house, there is a tap, which when opened, sounds like the sea. 

This is how in the night, the city turns in on itself and releases the music which gives you permission.

In the night, the song escapes from the city’s gritted teeth, the smile made from the buildings on the sides of the street meeting as the two sides of your jaw would meet, their roofs crunching together. That song is the only thing that is, in the night.

The song that becomes a dissonant whisper, as it is usurped by dawn.