What is it we do
To ourselves late at night
As the coals simmer softly in the darkness?
The moon doesn’t exist for us,
There’s too much romance we’ve applied
To that ball of dust in the sky we’ve allied.
We’ve forgotten about the Romantics:
Wordsworth’s rainbows and Blake’s grain of sand.
But we have ourselves still –
We really do.
And we sit in the dark
In our own shadows
Within the shadow of something else.
That pain inside
We can’t quite understand.
All competing for a love we will never receive –
So it goes…
So we blend ourselves into the dark
Like the artist rubbing the charcoal on the page.
We ask questions we don’t understand
So any answer wouldn’t be noticed.
At the sight of a ray of light spilling through
A wooden blind
We see an opportunity to celebrate;
Celebrate not the light
But the unlit.
These tropes of light and dark!
Tiresias who saw all; Oedipus who did not.
Yet Oedipus saw, Tiresias did not.
So what is it then?
This grotesque Romanticism of smudging ourselves?
We’re splatters of one colour
On the same coloured canvas.
But we want to be noticed.
We still want to be seen.