The Torch

The Torch

A sticky-tape window

blows the wind kazoo

And I'm awake but not downstairs

Where television murmurs

and rising crescendos,

are too muddy to make out

So softly,

I dangled from the landing

straining to hear

... louder murmurs

Cold-footed, back to the street light

muffled by curtains

(cut from an old downstairs pair),

I slide toes to rest on the

still warm, cat-jacketed

prattling bottle

I want to converse, I want to discuss

I want to engage with bright minds;

Yet you abandon me to nod, and

I might quietly die on those parallel lies

(why aren’t you more grown up?) But

better still - behind my “night-night” smile

I sneak supplies upstairs

Beneath the sheets, the old tin torch

with an eye like a marble

illuminates jumble-sale books

Dry, brown, smelly,

making unfashionable sense

“The Scarlet who?” My friends enquired…

With a stained blue battery

the transistor whistles and gabbles in my ear

Luxembourg. Caroline. Dogger, German Bite

Animals and black girls harmonise

I finger the dial and high-speed morse

riffles in and out of phase

Closed station anthems repeat

into empty space

“ta, ta, tara, ta taraah - rah”,

guttural voices

announce strangulated songs

and staccato Hindi chatter

follows driven orchestrations…

My library of the lost,

a dissonant waffle of logic

no regnal dates, no historic battles

Just an ode on an urn, a faery queen

and a flat battery, when I wake