Every closing door
swings another door wide
and we might be reconciled
to transit like passage vagrants,
there, but for grace and fortune,
into the rooms where pleasure hides
and coyly guards its face behind a hand,
secretly telling us here is where we need to be:
no point in keeping faith or leaping with it
into unknowns and darknesses
of impossible escape.
And so we carry on,
tobogganing in time,
through downslope days
where no-one has a name
for the breathtaking slipstream,
kidnapped by the madcap journey,
held hostage against what little will we had,
and driven through breaches in the walls
that surrounded us like doubt.
We have no choice but to go on:
sing hallelujah, chant amen, make signs,
clutch talismans, beat the chest for bravery;
courage is as misplaced as unholy terror
at all the whistling demons we imagine
skulk beyond the shadowy portals
through which we now hurtle
hopeless and out of control.
What's that? The human condition? Inevitability and random chance? Mind your own business! Here we go, thinking we're in control but only in the sense of someone falling from the sixteenth floor and declaring 'So far, so good,' as they pass the fifteenth…
Ach, it was just a thought…
Gallows humour, anyone?
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