BRUISED NIGHT

Let me tell you a story true, tonight:

The trees soften like molasses through the night, bent and finger-figured, just as our words honey through our heads and the world in all its endlessness, yields into shape, be it shapeless or not

and so I sit, late at night, stealing all the sounds around, the falling beats, the broken branches like a come-on, the upturned dandruff leafs, leaving the darkened park as if an algebra of this and that, all that night swaying that marries the thoughts of my own: fear and adulation and circumspect listening. So, I sit in a park, emptied of people, kittled instead by all the fauna that fawns itself into knowing

The taxis and the sky and the small slap of changing streetlights: eye blink, lips dried kiss, step upon step upon snap.

And then there is the moon, abbreviated by the canopy and yet moves with the sway of the swipe of the Racoon family as they dart beside me, at first oblivious to my moon-sitting, High Park bench surfing. And the three adolescents that click past me, mischievous and unafraid, as one gallops toward me and away like a mis-thrown dart or drunken kiss landing on the collar, and I watch the mother

and she arches and fears and watches if my hand to pet the first is threatening or lazily flirtatious

and they move past and I am stilled because all that enters stills, like a blue bruise appearing one morning as if a hosted ghost

In this time of people speaking for you, of words that get all entangled and webbed into misappropriated knots and quick-judgments, I let all that go and think of how much i want to share the nearness of that fear, with you. Of the soft hair of the fearless rodent that approached, of the mother's willingness to wait before her back became all Jurassic, before her teeth shone like the corn stuck in the dentures of the old women in the window as I walked later by a neighbourhood bar, speaking to you through technology and epoch-old rhythms, of all these things

And baby, they shall not see that because they refuse to stay still enough, to close their mouths long enough, to shut off all the electric and circumferential language long enough to be able to recognize something simple

regardless of what others construct, regardless of what the world construes, alien and predator and dipping dream, I sat there and let it go and reached out toward the darkness and softened from both the ply of the raccoon's back, the mother's shriek, and all the madness that columns in the world around

I let all their judgement go for they have not listened but have only eared, that of the bespeaking instead of the gathering and what shall we do but swallow it and Trent it golden, even if they render it brass'd and rusty

Sorrow as a sway, it is not the falling as we tumble, but that small, electric tail that tries to make sense as it ricochets in its passing, the way words accumulate on the bedsheet or the ashes beneath the bench. It is always in the noticing

Let the world spin silent, let that touch mean more than the collapsing,

and the moon fires blue in the trees

and our heart blooms as a marigold through the long night and into the morning's flowering

and there, past the park and over the sea, we recall, together, the flashing green light

There but with you, I go.

There we, go.