Someone with the authority to do so
Had tended a toppled bollard
With black bin liner.
The University slope recalled,
Of all places,
Aberystwyth.
Stethoscope antlers peeked
Ostentatiously
Out of white coat pockets.
High-rises everywhere,
As inscrutable as people
You will never see inside.
It jerks and rumbles through the blue,
Hauling night-capped sitters
Over seven time-zones.
They emerge rubbing bleary sun,
Breathing forgotten toothpaste.
Clock hands are all out of whack,
If anything slipping slyly back,
And the taxi red in a breakfast noon.
That night it’s 3am, or 7pm,
Dinner: broccoli, salmon, spaghetti!
The routine buoys him,
The rhythm looses,
And floating on homeward foam,
He departs a nameless jetty.
Dotted lanterns wend invitingly
Up the smudged hillside.
I want to go there,
But the sculpted steps will be treacherous:
Yesterday was T8,
And the typhoon washed the whole island.
It has moved on now,
Moved home across the waves,
But it is still apparent,
Puddled on the roads and in the vapour.
The descendant mist stoops fast,
Faster than expected,
And soon those distant lanterns will be unwinked;
What then will guide the crowd,
Through the heavy, pressing shroud,
And keep the stumblers back
Beyond the brink?
Shorter Poems 