Newcastle

Go home all you who have vacated youth
Do not stand and linger, awaiting proof
of our insolent crimes.
Remember the lights that shift and the gulls cry
the breeze that swept the hair from
both eager eyes
         Forget the senseless din
and the wire that is winding;
your life, stretching thin.

Pass all the bustled, hurried streets
or the heaving mass when the lights recede
People stumble, in dimly lit rooms you are swimming through,
fumbling, imbibe and consume, the streets washed neon.

In the mass and din
beneath the rumble of speakers,
and painted veneer of vice and sin
the reverberations in your chest
and the drink in hand which is spilling unnoticed

The girl in that dress, in that mirror
she's putting on your make up,
she is smiling your smile
the rush of chemicals,
the taste in her mouth
her skin alight.


Or you can't go in.

Maybe you are dragged with slaves in thrall
or dragged screaming obscenities, flailing
out of you skull.  Not a popular place to be it seems.
Forgetting who you are this evening
with the taste of alcohol
and the cloying din
the clamour of a thousand voices, chipping in.
and when the music stills
all are at loss for words
a silence begins.
The tapping on shoulders ceases,
the mat that you left in pieces is swept away
so you pay your respects to who is leaving
and then onto the streets.


It was cold that night, you walked with arms folded
through alleys; the landscape changes
the world is decayed, corroded
remnants of a revenant time
not yet ready to embrace this moment
to give in to the tide, and you
the clothes that didn't fit this morning
do not fit you still, leave marks in well accustomed
skin.  

Your terrain is changing too.

Now your eyes roll,
for though their eyes told you
that you more than fill
what you're wearing,
smiles, grins, murmuring
but you cannot go in.

Like the slowly yellowing men
standing in the doorways
or hung heavy over the black railings
peering into filling ash lined gutters,
        wind swept
glimpsing lights in the traffics creep
through the heart of nowhere.
Like the drawn faces, stained men
in a sulfurous hue, with idle
sideways glances at quarry
they are too far gone to pursue.

Like them, too, you can not go in.


So you go, counting tail lights
permitting eager advances
making a mess of your bed.
and everyone else's.
a successful night.


Beyond the cities light
its raped youth.