A new edit.

Not A Rhapsody in the night

(in response to T.S.)

I’m here, ear to brick post, hair pushed out of eyes
and shirt torn where it got caught on a barbed word
as I crossed through your domain to this site late on some street

whose name I have not bothered to read, outside a house

whose occupants, as far as I am concerned, might as well be dead.

I certainly am, that has been made dead plain, or crystal clear.

I might even enjoy their decaying smell. You certainly did.

It may echo the smell that resides within this chest of mine
where ribs wriggle like maggots around withering, white flesh.

The port bottle is clenched, a precious key to a distant door
(as if there is hope if I merely turn things the right way
to find sunlight where only night dwells) and my eyes

stare up and stars stare down. We eyeball each other blindly

as I take another swig and nothing is said except inside my head

where words rotate, spin, cartwheel, conjugate misdeeds,

misunderstandings, misplaced agreements and donated misdemeanors.
All hoarded and then given back to me in the hour before the fall

(everything resides on the spinning, gaudy deck of the fairground horses).

The brick post I lean against cares little, less even
than the cheap port (at least it fires the pitbull stomach

with its leaden purge of all the things we’ve said and haven’t).

If the night could only be bent. Curved like an arch,

or the rainbow bridge, so that morning light would spread

and these demons finally be laid to rest for another day.

But night, like your mind, my absent one, is set,
and I am doomed to forever gyrate around
what has occurred (Yorrick, held in the greasy palm
of your easy and indifferent judgment).

The bottle finally spits itself dry.
I smash it against the road, enjoy the miniature explosion,
wish I could repeat the gesture on the inside.
Would I then be cleansed? Or would it set off

a series of explosions – a beginning, an end?

The moon will not rise. Venus has drifted too far
and Pluto, they tell me, is not even a planet.
But Mars, oh Mars remains, laughing in red;
and your words, like Saturn’s welded rings,
go around and around in my head

as the temperature, this undying night, drops to below

that needed for a heart to bloom.