Alone

Alone, in your small brick box, you sit in your small brick house,

idly watching the world go by on a small, black glass screen.

You wait and wait till the day you die, alone with a spouse,

distracting yourself with fantasies that cannot be seen.

Alone, smoking by the window, you look out your brick box

to see rows and rows of the same cold, concrete, tall towers.

You want to run and run as sharp time slowly sneaks and stalks

but you are trapped here, losing more and more harrowing hours.

Alone, on the same-old boring bed, you lay in the dark

next to a partner you barely know, drifting to sound sleep.

As they sleep, you think of the life you could have lived and stark

dead dreams haunt you while at the bottom of the steep sheep heap.

Alone, the next dead day in your metal box, you drive to work

to the same concrete tower to sit in the same office.

You push buttons in the same cell like any other clerk

as if an ape behind a machine trained for a profit.

Alone, you drive home in your same metal box along endless

winding roads, waiting and waiting in long lines of cold cars.

Idly staring ahead, you realise you are friendless

yet are too focussed on the changing lights to think, to pause.

Alone, when home, you wander into wide, wild, whistling woods,

searching and searching to escape from the end of the world.

The dying bark around you reminds you of lost childhoods -

a cruel contrast to that elusive, youthful dreamworld.

As the golden god retreats, the birds sing a melody

of sweet freedom, swooping through the soft air without cold chains,

landing atop a branch blowing in the warm, whirling wind,

lit up by the shimmering, heavenly colours of dusk.

As you look to the sky, the Earth is plunged into darkness

and out comes the soft eyes of your long lost, dead ancestors,

shining in the infinite void, watching far from above,

waiting, waiting, for your coming return to the Heavens.

As you stare into their eternal eyes, you lose yourself.

In this grand order of consuming chaos, you are lost.

"What does it all mean? Is it meaningless?" you ask yourself.

Clueless, walking back home in the moonlight, you remain lost.

Alone, opening the same decaying door, you reach your box,

idly drinking, watching the world go by, losing your mind.

Tick, tick, tick, the same, slithering, old, consuming, cold clocks

count down the days till the light goes out; yet you are still blind.

- N.L.B. 29/07/2021