With a phrase from Franz Wright’s ‘Another Working Dawn’
you’re dreaming still : soaring high above an endless city : your view

slantwise : your back to the dawning sun : the streets are empty :

the high-wires knotted with pigeons : you’re dreaming still :

of absent friends : of your own domestic library : its drowsy aroma :

the piles of weighty hardcovers you’ve acquired : there’s nothing

for it : but to turn yourself out into the streets : post-boxes

gagging junk mail : newspapers lying at the streetsides : unexploded :

even the notorious guard-dogs, the most predictably vehement

of them, have developed inhibitions in the night : which means

nothing : you’re dreaming still : meat-hooks in the soft ham

of your ankles : scraping the pavement : a dreadful rasp : that wakes

the neighbours : that wakes the whole indecent postcode :

clammy in their bed-sheets : from their dreamless sleep :

or sleepless dreams : one way or another, they’re dreaming still :

late night programming flickering inside their eyelids : station ads :

infotainment : the exposed breast they didn’t kiss : aged sixteen :

that wakens them : with a hankering for pavlova : it doesn’t matter :

you’re streets away : in an avenue of enthusiastic bottlebrush :

that sheds its eyelashes onto your shoulders : where some ghost :

some lost child or teen suicide : agitates a swing in the soldiers’

memorial gardens : rattling its chains : with a lightness that counters

the heft of gravity : its tension on the swing : its catenary fullness :

puddles in the gutters shiver : attuned to some resonance

beneath your hearing : suffering it like a skin : some gristle

in the teeth of the fault-line : on a corner a broken bird : dishevelled :

its eyes screwed shut : it’s dreaming still : wheeling high above

this vast suburbia : paved with rooftops : its view slantwise :

far beyond the curvature of the earth :