Midnight
The white wash, crumbling windows
will not open, dust encased, glistening
and wishful under lampshade-less bulb
midnight and a sky night train passes to my right: I search for stars
all prearranged and ordained against the impossible
redness of Mars, but one shouldn’t mix colours
when the pallet is already a dirty purple, you’ll make a mess
and to the left you lie crumpled, the crinkling sound of graphs
on primary school tracing paper, the scratchy and the delight
in being wasteful – the heating on, the veins pulsating
the ripping off of clothes on the night I close my notebook.
My eyes are itchy and the pebbledash ceiling causes nausea,
and cracks imperceptibly- havoc in a broken yoke. The tiny comets
of the universe, dance beyond reach of the slow grasping hands of babies
wishing you farewell, the paradise of midnight Earth,
the fear of asymmetry
home to a god we so desperately want to believe in.
Jack Little (b. 1987) is a British-Mexican poet, editor and translator based in Mexico City. He is the author of ‘Elsewhere’ (Eyewear, 2015) and is the founding editor of The Ofi Press: www.ofipress.com He was the poet in residence at The Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island in Ireland in July 2016.
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