Monday 19 February 2024

Poem (21): I had a dream that I was not free


 I had a dream that I was not free

The helicopter I can see through wintered windows

buzzes like a bat above allotments

spending their changeless days spying on

the notoriously-near suburban twin tube stations,

which I’d join with icy tape in the dark blue shock of morning.

 

Every night, modern with disaster, the pride of the skies

clucks sudden and inevitable on its singular target

– which is me, curious and naïve - at a precise forty-five degree.

Move, boy, move, to the back room where you’ll be safe

with the black cat purring like a machine with no cogs.

 

Here it comes the smoking agent of bright night, all

features framed in childlike wonder, blinking over the newsagent

and the furniture showroom, pausing in kinship

with the crumbling cinema, bursting the bravest alien from

the sepia screen and spiralling to fill the frame of middle age,

 

clicked and cut like newsreel over the chimney

of Sydney and Sally playing their morning saxophones

viciously like a jazz lullaby, of Phillip the cameraman

crying his love to sleep, of Dennis the luminous drunk hitting his

pale children in the fragile explosive peace.

 

I had a dream that I was not free.

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