Saturday 14 November 2020

Waiting in the dark

There's a lot of waiting going on, waiting for a vaccine, waiting to see if Christmas will be locked down, waiting for a grown up in the White House (at least that's over), just waiting for things to get better,

 
Waiting in the dark
 
Take the volume from the incessant chatter
snuff the blazing lights
sit down in darkness
comforted by patience
 
Stretched between twitching hope
and the sleep of nostalgia
the comfort of newness, of possible change
Or the embrace of the rush of the familiar
 
Wandering from one day to the next
with no race to run
no flames to feed
the metronome clocks
another day
that slips spent to the pile 
 
I sit in the dark
fix on one dim shape
and build around that reality
rebuild a sense of me,
that has been dismantling
 
Washing dressing eating working
scrolling, petitioning
wishing for time travel
either forwards or back
 
Waiting in the rain of speculation
for a cure, a believable all-clear, or a way out
waiting for the same again, again
to stay safe is to stay still, and let go
accept this is out of my hands
 
Sweet nostalgic music has lost all meaning
return to that country cut off by shifting plates
lose myself in stranger sounds, for stranger times
textural landscapes, shapes and patterns
that emerge from groans and clangs
Sylvian and Sakamoto,
T.Rex and Tom Waits
from a different time
a different place
to repaint the here and now
 
So I sit in night
shrouded in the weight of these times
while shadow dogs guard me
sinking into the comfort of the dark