The Night Market

Reworked. Maybe it's better. Who knows.

The Night Market

Because the night is broken and leaking
Starlight through the bedroom walls,
I will let my feet grow cold and colder
To find who knows to find me here.

It’s better to be awake when the dead
Come to lie across your legs.
It’s better to have your eyes open
When the stars begin to sing.

For then the strangeness can be yours
Even as the ghosts are not,
Are the children or ancestors of others,
Who rise when you rise, beckoning

To take you by the hand and fly
As you fly in dreams, to the night market.

There are crowds there, faces lit
And shadowed by charcoal fires
Spitting kebabs tended by toothless men,
Crowds that do not press but give way.

A brush from your arm, a basin of pearls
Spills out across the ground.
You cannot pick one but all the others
Must follow in a glistening strand.

What is taken is the means to explain.
What is left is the chance to breathe again.
At any moment after –midday sitting
On a park bench, say – the stars can find you,

Reach down through dappled sky, and push.
If you fall now you will keep on falling –
Who may catch you?  For to live
Is to be left, is to know there are burdens

No one can be free of and still be alive,
To know we would gladly have chosen
That burden were we but given the chance.
But choice itself is what life denies.