The Public House

PUBLISHED IN THE COPPERFIELD REVIEW: Volume 10 Number 4 AUTUMN 2011 Edition



The Public House

The public house
challenges me to a duel again.
I walk to it as though
I intend to answer.

Behind the sky
the great senseless
eye un-blinks at me.

The clouds roll overhead
like knotted mounds of change  
as I go shuffling along into
a field of a lesser yield.

The harvest:
bloated gobs of shadow,
the overgrowth of the forgotten
and the tomorrow nights.

In the bar room haze,
we keep to a steady sway,
clinging to the drinks in hand

and howling
to the rafters
like a naked choir
in the Church of night.

We clink
our hanging heads
in obscurity,

little mechanical phantoms,
grazing together on the edges
of a muffled horizon.