City of Tiny Lights

November night rolls up the moon;

street-lit clouds leach away the light;

something resembling starlight shakes a fist;

incandescence shines like neon saints 

converging in a sky of little rain.

Heaven bleeds sodium orange

from the centre to the edge,

contoured slopes, convex in the night,

mountainous under tumbling stars.

The city is a fire under broken sky,

weather creeping in like blown smoke

on ill-favoured wind, time running

down like a clock’s unwinding,

Above the shimmer,

above the noise of after-hours,

how the pulse beats in an eardrum,

how the streets echo with traffic

and the horns of tiny things,

buses, trains and cars,

transport weeping in the night

to tears of regret and the knowledge

that nothing stops beneath the lights,

nothing wavers, nothing pauses,

and the shift from dark to day

only dims the bulb.

© BH, 2020

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City of Tiny Lights. First, I remembered Zappa. Compelling pice of music. But then, it seemed from another place. Another time.

I toyed with it and toyed with it. In then this emerged from the lexicon in my head. Seemed to me more resonant of cities, here, in the north than in the wild city-landscapes of the States.

You can take the man out of… I've been stateside. Love some of it. This is just me and my remembering of the lights we all reflect