Poem #16: A Night at a Concert
A Night at a Concert
This night smells of brimstone,
needles in the atmosphere
piercing the bones of clouds keeping us all together,
a heart burning, dripping brimstone upon the road.
I cannot borrow the tears of rain shivering
all in one piece;
the sidewalk is boiling from the colour of pale skin
to the cardboard hue like packages in the mail.
The taste of cherries were in my mouth, but
it’s all gone rotten, and
walking downtown never tasted so foreign—
oh, El Shaddai, save my soul!
This music is hypnotism, the traffic hungry
for movement—oh, let me move mildly free.
The big trucks passing would rattle the house,
but home, it refuses to see with human eyes.
Hesitant as the fogbanks curling on the horizon,
I’m strapped in silence,
sodden with all the secular kids,
in so little room to cross the road, hundreds at a time—
my knees are jerking just to jump back in the car ride home.
Modesty—what a suffering word,
but don’t we love to live with it?
Oh, El Shaddai, save our souls,
For we hardly know what we are doing.
why do we need so much space to get
through the door? One concert over, a thousand
more bands to see; folding and unfolding feet
treading a crosswalk of inhibition, rain settling
on these blank downtown corners—Union Street, steaming
of brimstone, like a river of hot coals.
This movement, this consuming, irrelevant, inevitable
movement—beautiful, isn’t it? Afford me this
rationed breath to move, to escape nowhere, and
I want to know the colour of everything
without it hurting: to know the colour of a true
walk downtown, the colour of loving life. Now, here,
I hear the rhythm shaking, the chords being cut;
Music—where are you in this mess?
Here, now, this is how my head will lift on high—
Oh, El Shaddai, help me save this world,
for we don’t know where it’s going.
