A Night Affair

Last night I took a walk.

Through mountains of concrete and valleys of a poor mans scouring.

Cradled in the icy arms of night and carried to a time when thoughts fly free and love lives utterly uninhibited.

Where has that gone?

As I walked, I saw young lovers wrapped in tenacious embraces, trying desperately to abdicate the expectations set upon them by overbearing predecessors.

I saw the homeless.

So easily forgotten, yet more abundant in self-assurance than most. They are not homeless; The world is their home. Make fun of their card-board box when you, too live in a box.. only yours is wooden, or maybe brick. We search for years upon years, looking for an answer to a question that has yet to be asked when they have asked and have found and though they may have lost, they are already two steps ahead of us.

I saw the pulchritudinous night sky, threatened by bludgeoning pins and needles of stories upon stories of concrete, steel and glass.

I heard the competition of car horns screaming at the top of their electromagnetic capacity for nothing greater than the satisfaction of having the bigger stick.

I heard the cry of a young child who had dropped his binky.

A panicking mother, wanting neither to hear the child's beleaguering wine nor to present him with the defiled pacifier, in turn bellows at the greatest extent of her lungs and begs the adolescent to discontinue his cry.

He is silent. He looks up at his mother as if to say, "Was all that really necessary?"

It was.

I shivered in the grip of the night and cowered under the watchful eye of the ever-present moon.

I closed my eyes and allowed myself to become enveloped in the embrace of the Cimmerian shade.

There exists beyond this moment no possibility of life.

Here in the night, I live.

~*Darius A. Journigan*~