Night Watch

Town of a thousand holes, at the bottom


Of each a dark boggart lurks cunningly


Creating mischief for careless souls who’re


Simply passing. Urban plastic tendrils


Squirm, coil and wrap around the bed ridden


Riding alive through comatose dreaming.


All the while, tower blocks round and about,


Facades irritated by rashes of light


Wind is scratching, rain hardly soothing,


Pluck up their concrete roots and, like golems,


Lurch along through pedestrian precincts,


Passed shops and stores blinded by steel shutters


Billed with vainglorious posters proclaiming


Imminent revolution, this week’s sales,


Or the immanence of God and the end


Of Days. Even as ungainly tower blocks


Retreat beyond traffic lights, boggarts


Emerge from excavations flimsily


Fenced round with barbers’ poles, in such a way


Shadows might ease free from corporeal


Bodies responsible for casting them.


Night is the product of curtains being drawn


Against streets that have to be abandoned


To darkness, light so selfishly horded


In living rooms, in the eyes of voyeurs


Who do not realise televisions


Are vampires that exist by sucking life-time


From their fascinated victims. Too late


They switch off, for it’s bed time, deathbed time.


The night watch is running slow, leaden hands


Weighing every heavy second, holding


Each one just too long, making the minutes


Fall behind the clock. A hospital cot


Easily contains these remains of a man,


So little of him left, his shadow gone.


Even breath can be no longer his own,


Generous town sharing its air with him


Via one of those serpentine urban tendrils


Worming its way through the wall to his nostrils.


Hardly a burden with so little left


Him to draw from his account. Family


Come and sit and sit and go in relays


Of concern, keeping his lips barely moist


With final kisses and cool water soaked


Into pink sponge swabs on thin lollysticks


Looking like unspun candyfloss. Night watch


Knits or reads or plugs into World Service


While drowsing on the one comfy armchair.


For all that time is tardy dawn still comes,


Shift changes, while night and day will remain


All the same to him even as tower blocks


Step back into place, boggarts burrow back


Into earth and the curtains are drawn back,


Back and back, releasing light from their rooms


To illuminate awakening streets


And the living realising they are so.


                                                               Dave Alton