Nightwatchman & Muse

[Mark A. Murphy]

Night-Watch Man & Muse

I watch over the town like a lost angel
just beginning to grasp the significance of my task.
Where ever you are asleep, I hear the sounds
of sleep-walkers, sleep-talkers and sleep-junkies – too tired
to mutter more than the odd syllable about growing old,
reciting the names of ex-lovers and sweet-hearts
as though their litanies would bring back
the lost, the wounded, the deceased
for that one last conversation that would change everything.
They talk the honest talk of the subconscious mind
(allowing as we do for the affairs of translation)
and we must congratulate them on their night babble.
Never again will Jill tell Jack the truth – only in dreams.
And what of the truth, undependable as it is, changeable
as always by the way the light catches valleys and peaks.
My task is simply to watch and listen whilst
the last of the party goers take themselves home
and the very last stragglers, who have lost their sense
of what is right and wrong, think their way
into the bedrooms of the handsome and the beautiful.
I do not seek to order the night, I hear the lonely
the sick, the maligned, the disparate voices
of a town groaning under the weight its own contradictions
and offer comfort in the long hours when no other voice
but the stranger’s voice on the phone will do.

[Manna]

Mark,
What type of response interests you most? Do you want your poems workshopped? Are they finished works that you're showing & sharing? You haven't posted enough yet for me to know you, and I don't know how much we'll get to interact after 5.31, but I like how you write. Your writing never seems contrived, it just works really well.

This may as well be about this forum, eh? Sorry this didn't receive my attention until now, as I like it. I haven't read it well enough yet to know if it's good, but my first instinct is that it is.