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.