Tuesday Poem: "Strange Peace"

The wet nightmorning.

Lights of empty shops

faking impregnable security.

Occasional passing car

shiftworkers or

hidden dawn missions

going Godknowswhere in the

hissswish of tyres on

the black dappled road.

This sudden trigger swinging

open a memory door

long shut falling

like a shaft of light in the

cathedral of 4 a.m. St Kilda

open 24 hours to the

prayers of vice.

In my tram conductor uniform

a brown incongruity moving past a

flashing backdrop of sleaze

Fitzroy Street acrawl with junkies

whores and winos

cockroaches scuttling in the cruel chill of the

nether time.

That strange peace between night and day

before polite society comes out to play.

The poet wishes to acknowledge The Press in whose pages this poem first appeared.

While wandering around the interweb one day, I stumbled upon a make-your-own-movie-from-text website (what can't they do with technology these days?). Not long after, I was intrigued by one of Mary McCallum's poems where she had set it to an animation created through this same website, xtranormal. If the reader wishes to see an animation of the poem above (albeit a clumsy one) go to the link below:

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/12040038/strange-peace