Inside a Box inside a Bigger Box
Inside A Box Inside A Bigger Box
Inside a box inside a bigger box
Tightly strapped to my glass desk, I work.
At noon, clocks droop and melt.
My colleagues stiff, as if in rigor mortis -
One more line of code in place,
One email answered. Endless, it feels,
Promethean, our imprisonment.
But evening falls; colours must now be
Strong enough to see, or they just fade.
Clarity rises. On coming home,
Shakespeare and Kipling and that old dog
Kerouac greet me, tails wagging: "Read us."
And then three or four hours are nothing:
They're as sufficient as the short minutes
Of a last good-bye between old friends.
Most people reckon life is short.
It must be, then, that we perceive of it
Not as the sum of countless working days
Or five hundred monthly salaries,
But as time spent in dim, flickering light,
Enjoying words or sounds or images
Or, the more fortunate, another person.
--
Walking downtown at midnight
Walking downtown at midnight
Walking downtown at midnight
Should feel less homely, less safe.
I was duly brought up on
"Trundle in darkness, step on dogsiht".
Why does this squalor seem sweet, then?
The dusty bar stools, the abandoned cars;
The pavements cracking with grief,
The hooker's flabby arm hailing a cab,
The card players coughing downstairs.
This grime has always been here,
Before the Body Shop, before Macdonald's,
Like a bastard child stalking his father
Crouched behind loud, fake neon.
All nonsense gone, all windows smashed,
All pseudo-grandeur flushed down the loo.
But supermarket bags and dust still foxtrot
And question-marked strangers still roam
Around these unlit slippery paths:
They all connect me to a familiar past.
Let me stand here. Business as usual
For the mouldy wall thick with graffiti.
The Africanos argue by the traffic light.
Drunk people walk slowly, losing life.
Yes, when sickened by what was taken away
One needs a steady point to fix his gaze upon.
The city's slimy nights supply it, freely.
