Waking at Midnight

It’s not nice waking at midnight when you’re me:
dead to the world on Western medication,
you look the Night in the eye and find
the world might’ve quietly passed you by.

There might be a snake on the patio too.
Then again it could be your imagination
grown over-wrought, inspecting shadows.
Still it’s safer to stay in than go out.

The moon is a drunkard above the yew tree.
You see this from the kitchen window.
Telly through the wall leaks in from another room:
it’s where the lion from the heart of Poem

Records originates, when you’re a child,
listening in to telly through the wall, in
the inner city, hearing its whiskers dipped in News.
But childhood is gone, as seems the city -

here we have a pretty place of artistic retreat.
The loneliness rots in the whole, human heart.
At least in reading the voices go away.
I’m on The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell.

John F.B. Tucker

If you have any thoughts about this poem,  John F.B. Tucker would be pleased to hear them