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Twenty Four Hours
He swaggers through suburbia
Each turn of the street
Like a twist in a tale of adventure,
The world walks by his side
Like a woman clutching his arm
Dressed in pearls and glistening fur.
People walking their dogs flinch
From his far and away eyes
As if he was a thug on a rampage,
A gritting truck careers by,
A flying speck splinters his eye
And makes it his only real world.
The storefront signs glow
In the dark shellac pools
Left by the driffling rain
The moon drapes its dustsheet
Over houses as if they were
Cabinets in a museum.
Now he is alone on the damp grass
Of the recreation ground,
A blackbird sings to catch its heart
In the air beyond its beak,
Excitement roams his body
With nothing to cling to.
Returning to his room
He lies awake, foraging across
The borders of the night
The cold pipes
Wheeze and a tap clicks
Its fingers in the sink
Blessings counted and recounted,
As if things spoken, not being,
He turns them over in his mind.
A dark heavy dawn
With domino dots of snow,
He lets in a chill cube of air
From streets of a century past,
He walks a jagged track
Tearing open expanses.
The newly minted air
Stings his eyes, scrubs
Into his raw throat,
The snow shivers and slides
Off the conifers like pollen,
Cars are stopped in their harness of snow.
Things possessed by place
Attract him like a vice,
All things considered
And analysed as if alibis
For some crime that was
Merely a misdemeanour,
Knowing what it's like to be
A product of the heated reverie
Of his room where
Subject and object become one,
Metamorphosed into...
Into a metaphor, not real anymore.
The flowers she bought -
Her parting gift - group in their vase
Like a crowd at an accident
Or disaster about to happen,
Then drop echoing into
The mirror well on the wall.
His blood flows imperceptibly
Like someone else's.
He sits before the window's gloom
And grows a little older.
The rain is scoring bullseyes
Into the meltwater puddles. Now and
Again. Now and...
Thank you for saying, I don't know what
As you turned in your scarf, thank you.
So he drops a CD in the player
Hears the vanishing forever
Of every chord, every note...
Sees the wind flash its silver hair
At the opened window
Which he leans to shut
And now the rain stammers
To get something out,
Fizzing on the glass like soda.
His bedside clock futilely chips
Away at the block of time to make
Timeless art that no-one will ever see.
He does whatever people do on wet days,
Now and then he finds himself as still
As people on a station platform.
Like an hour continually striking
Are the sounds of this moment in time,
As foreign as reflections in a glass,
No values or desires, as weightless
As blood passing along the alleys
Up the steep glacier of his spine.
The skyline draws a cartouche
Of red counterfeit mountains,
The unclimbed alps of the sunset.
A dog barks out its one-sided
Argument, a police siren
Sends jabs of chronic pain.
He thinks of raising the gun
Pulling the trigger of the undeniably real
A centimetre away from his brow,
The flower vase and clock blown to pieces,
Shrouded in veils of yellow gunsmoke...
He breathes again, the air is cool
Refrigerated by the absence of hours,
And a girl appears at the door who has all
The faces of everyone he's ever loved.
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