The Grey

On slow-light morns
I meet the grey,
An absent sky,
It’s light, afraid.
It heralds the bleak
The tired, mundane,
Most loathsome, most
Despairing of days.

And yet this day, though bleak,
Though vision frayed
And blue sky strangled
By the 'gulfing grey,
After a shower and an eye-shut shave
The bleakest day,
Is realised.

I am awake.

The night strays
Into a dream,

A retreat:
A wall,
On which I lean
When under throws
Of volleyed wants and drowned woe,

To stolen escapes,
Beneath the wet.
To smoke,
To dwell.
To taste regret.

I will not die regretful,
Nor dissatisfied,
For I raced against the millions
To call this life my prize.

A seagull grooms.
The harbour sleeps.

The sky a-stir,
Responsibility creeps.

I sat there in the rain,
On the cracking pavement.
I watched them walk with apathy,
But a step before enslavement.

A man of age,
Decades rinsed his muddied fingers.
Raises a wet-dog brow in the face of rain,
His life half lived, half lingered.

I fell out of the night
And in to the day.
Got up from the morning,
Struggled into the bathroom of afternoon.
Stared into the mirror of mid-day gone,
And shuffled down the stairwell into evening.

As I found a seat amidst the lonely aisles,

Settled into worry,
A look at the clock,
No sooner to realise,
I had fallen back into the night.