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by gillian prew
I longed to be the soul of a city
its chords and black moments
the movement of its people
making love or dying.
How they flog silence. Only noise
is a virtue. Black noise they groan
at each end of their sparse allotment
and in the middle somewhere
their orgasms music for weddings
and funerals both. I remain
parallel to weddings and my funeral
has always been superfluous –
but graveyards are comforting when living.
Virtue there is not noise but corpses
and even then only inert goodness
which amounts to nothing
probably. It is all nothing
without love. We make do with the rest
but it laughs at us when our backs are turned.