Conceal
“Broadcast me a joyful noise, unto the times, Lord…”
– R.E.M. , Bad Day
They forgot to colour in the sky, once again, today.
Like the computer simulation’s running overtime;
blueskies.exe has encountered a fatal error
and all that’s left is the blank page of white.
Look up and you could be anywhere, anyone, anyhow
Look up and you’re horribly, wildly, devastatingly free.
Look up and cease to remember, into the endless nothing.
I had a recurring dream about a day the sky would look like this.
You and I would lie on the ground beneath grey tower-block skies
All the tiny, invisible harpoons of the world dragging us this way and that
Lying there, on the cold, hard earth, not saying a word.
This is where I’m met late at night stumbling home with too-heavy too-much shopping
and I take the shortcut, the way I don’t really know, and I’m encountered
by knife-wielding, slavering, desperate, guttural, crackhead love:
mugs me and steals my alone, and this is how I thought it would be, silent.
The clouds hide us from the stars and the knowledge of the vast expanse of space
the thousands of light-years between the way things are and could be
and they allow us the morphine fantasy that we are a drawing in the middle of the page
and not a shivering-confused blob that lives nowhere-in-particular,
for nothing but itself.
“Broadcast me a joyful noise, unto the times, Lord…”
– R.E.M. , Bad Day
They forgot to colour in the sky, once again, today.
Like the computer simulation’s running overtime;
blueskies.exe has encountered a fatal error
and all that’s left is the blank page of white.
Look up and you could be anywhere, anyone, anyhow
Look up and you’re horribly, wildly, devastatingly free.
Look up and cease to remember, into the endless nothing.
I had a recurring dream about a day the sky would look like this.
You and I would lie on the ground beneath grey tower-block skies
All the tiny, invisible harpoons of the world dragging us this way and that
Lying there, on the cold, hard earth, not saying a word.
This is where I’m met late at night stumbling home with too-heavy too-much shopping
and I take the shortcut, the way I don’t really know, and I’m encountered
by knife-wielding, slavering, desperate, guttural, crackhead love:
mugs me and steals my alone, and this is how I thought it would be, silent.
The clouds hide us from the stars and the knowledge of the vast expanse of space
the thousands of light-years between the way things are and could be
and they allow us the morphine fantasy that we are a drawing in the middle of the page
and not a shivering-confused blob that lives nowhere-in-particular,
for nothing but itself.