Some folks call what sometimes passes for thinking at 2, 3 or 4 a.m.,
that prehistoric dark, barbed wire thinking.
For me, however (perhaps for others too) it is more:
it’s the trenches, going over the top, the tapping of machine guns, star shells fired by one’s fractious self to illuminate the dark.
And they don’t.
There’s the bipolarite swing of hope, despair, fear, brief bravery,
Light, dark, love, hate.
Familiar resentments. And warmths on the upswing.
Love not offered – the alcoholic mother who drinks for who knows what reasons, and her husband who sleeps with women in – that should be from – the church he found on a mountaintop in the highlands back then.
A mind snagged on familiar barbs.
Sometimes a hand, his own, pulls him back from wriggling too hard or long on any barb, and the tapping of the guns only ever threatens his demise despite the outside with the 20 metre fall from the balcony [not Juliet’s] he is aware of.
Beside the lather of the sea, he watches her watch he watch she kicking through fallen leaves of summer drought. And like the rest of us contemplating if this indeed is the end.
Inkstained fingers 