This is our night,
so we dampen down
stars onto pavements
which sleep on the other side
of the city’s eyes.
The long slow slope of the hills
stretches away
into the dark
and home.
In a park, the mouth
of a streetlamp gutters
and laughs. We are grinning
through a candle hour,
kicking back history
in the arch of our backs, the distant
chant of childhood a train wrecked
far off its tracks, a shadow lost
in some long-corridored past.
Cross the dark hills and
you hear them calling –
the other us –
the children down the hallway,
scrawling a sentence
which one day will speak
in the thawing smudge
of a kiss in this street,
where here and now
we are fizzing
and laughing
and dancing
when it is our night.