The moon glows bright enough to be a second sun
A gleaming opal, a shining mirror,
like a lighthouse, a beacon in the sea of
Blue, not black
Because it knows it’s too pretty to let itself fade.
Beneath bare feet, the ground is so warm
It feels soft, it cushions you, and you
Swear the late May air is whispering to you,
Kisses you, a moth landing gently on your arm,
So quiet it’s a spectre.
There is a stillness that asks you if you ever want to move again
And you know the answer.
A stillness that makes you realise stars love, that
Sunsets bring everything together:
The day closes like
a resting eye, like bedsheets
folding over lovers.
None of this is related to this poem.
Somewhere else, the night moves so slow
The cold air is tar, stagnant water.
No wind, a forced moment in time, until you are
Standing in the middle of the street,
The cool, harsh neon of cornershop lights
A mile away from you,
A replacement for the empty heavens.
Concrete stretches in all directions,
Silence waits for a car that never comes,
A stranger that never sees you,
An emptiness filling up.
Some call this feeling ‘directionless’
But that means there’s a direction to take.
This is what I’m talking about.
They say a chair is not really a chair,
Only atoms arranged ‘chair-like’.
They say islands are only a measurement of time,
That if nothing is permanent, nothing exists.
and
on this street
you are struggling to breathe
your lungshapes refuse to expand
to take in this thing we call oxygen
the scientific name for ‘closure’
The end is not really an end,
Only a sudden event arranged end-like.
And the endings they write about are sunsets,
Promises of better things,
They are summer
Slipping into autumn like a negligee.
They are warm evenings –
The warmness that cradles you, that feels like wearing nothing,
The guidance of lighthouses in the sky,
The embrace of strong earth beneath your feet – reassurance.
Sometimes things end like a cold snap in the middle of July.
Like a fire that refuses to start.
Like a
/
It ends like cremation – an unceremonious turn to dust.
Not everything is a poem.
Some things are just shaped stop-like
Because ‘end’
means it was going somewhere to begin with.
It means a story, a hero’s journey.
You were never going anywhere.
You just started noticing that you’re stationary.
I reach a hand to the sunset, pointing.
I let my fingertips kiss soft blue and ripe peach,
Sweet pinks and delicate lilacs,
The beauty of a quiet ending to the day.
‘Look’, I say to my father.
‘At what?’ he asks. ‘It all just seems grey to me.’
