Round Midnight

Working near your window
in the night's immense blank orb,
you seemed to glow with purpose
and exude content. Around midnight
Thelonius Monk's piano
kept you company, the husky-
dusky voices of jazz-singers
filled the room with smoke;
early-morning barges sent
their backwash hard against the bank
below the slope of lawn
beyond the window-sash, causing
drowsy mangrove-roosting birds
to start up, crying murder…

It was still a year before the hospital,
the ward with bars, the torture-chamber
where the voltage made your frame
convulse and ache, until the fragile
skeleton must crack under the grim
embrace, your mind sink, drowning
in the current, and your thorax
suffocate....
Later, you would lie, betrayed,
in sick incomprehension - a child,
abused by white-coated custodians.

Shall I go on? No, it was long ago,
and all your years of misery are gone.
Imploding in my brain are only
distant spasms, ricochets. Survivors
don't escape life's killing-field
unscathed, as you well knew. A pity
we can't compare notes: fission versus
slow attrition. One clear photograph
remains, in monochrome of indigo:
your head inclined toward the radio,
tuned to the moody piano, midnight
mellowing to early morning,
the sky's bloodshot eye.



for S