wb :

// A sonnet cycle

An evening lost to strangers on the street
Who peddle hours, sell illegally
Exchanging for your soul, another minute-

You cannot come near them as carelessly
As I have done. They linger in the light,
And hawk their wares where one might triumphantly

Declare his victory over certain night
When all around, the hands of watches tick
Without a sound, so as to be polite.

And as I roared, the candle burned its wick,
The day dissolved to dusk yet incomplete
To leave a few lit windows, stark and stoic;

I checked the time, the sky, and found defeat,
An evening lost to strangers on the street.

-~-

It is the night, a shimmer in the night,
A glint of silver dream, a fetid finger
To graze my nape, the morning's old malinger
That stood my hair, that toss'd me left and right
Beneath my blanket, safe I thought I slept
But cold is flagrant, oh so gently burning,
And in my sleep, I never knew the turning
As cold and clamour carelessly they crept

I bed with Winter and a herd of nightmares,
Upon her needles, midst their maddened neighs,
The verve of phantoms clutching at my nerves
For when my eyelids flutter, into nowheres
The ghosts of morning fade by ancient ways
Into my past, a fate they scarce deserve.

-~-

My night is lit by clinic fluorescence
All through the hours, till the sun again
Dares peek through grey-wooled curtains, takes his rein
And rides his chariot o'er the senescence
Of worlds that rot in ignominous black,
The mould of time, held back by desperate men-
Like trembling scratchings of an inkless pen,
They wreak upon this earth with soul alack

For dreams are stronger, fiercer than the wan
Of pallid noon, the god of feeble yearns.
I slumber in its glory, torn apart
By night and dark, for day is powerless when
The fire in the sky no longer burns
As bright as that which lights my mortal heart.

-~-

I shiver. It is morning, and my sun
Breaks bleakly over rippling sheets. I sneeze,
Disturbing asymmetricalities,
And then their silk-dune shadows merge to one.
It is a time when I should be resigned,
But somehow, something tugs me to my bed,
That bows my black-capped, great, and mighty head
And swallows sunrays gingerly consigned
To fetch me from the maw of somnolence.
The shadow tendrils flit as light as air,
As tentative as morning's breath on glass;
Those heavy hands to hold my reverence
Have clutched it close and signed their sigils where
The brightest light will never dare trespass.