Shadow Play

Simon MacCulloch

Night has edges, moon a sickle

Lasered bright from disc of nickel

Darkness cut from vinyl glints with stars

In between the buildings, alleys

Sink their clefts, unrivered valleys

Deepest of the dreamless city’s scars.

As you walk they trail behind you:

Shadows where the streetlamps find you

Scissored sharp, discarded on the way

Every one a self part-finished

Simplified, maligned, diminished

Actors in an ever-running play.

Thus the cuts and thus the paper

Readied for the midnight caper

Midnight, when the razored cast-offs meet

As an alley gapes to snatch you

Letting all your shadows catch you

Cut-outs tight-accordioned down the street.

Here in blackness, packed within you

Bitter selves will twist and spin you

Dance you mad with unfulfilled desires

This the price of never dreaming

Mind’s potentials crammed to screaming

Crave release that sanity requires.

So throughout the sleepless city

Thoughts inflamed and eyeballs gritty

Men composed of shadows flit through trash

Till the skyline’s bleak serration

Carves a grudging, smudged salvation:

Dawn, to burn the paper souls to ash.

Simon MacCulloch lives in London. His poetry has appeared in Reach Poetry, The Dawntreader, Emberr, The Chamber Magazine, Grim and Gilded, Aphelion, Ekstasis and others.