Night Watch
We shall learn to suffer the long dark,
Learn to melt with the short darkness.
As clouds cover the stars,
As the fire settles back
And the cats, relaxed, alert
Become still
( now it is their world).
The hum of voices, insistent, distracting, withdraws,
An undertow sucked into silence
(The spaces between things).
Roaming large and small:
The solid fears and frights,
Noises with eyes,
Snarl of unknowingness.
(Keep still.)
It is the edges that melt away
The words no longer mine.
The certainties belong to naive daylight
Not to this red tongue of dark beauty
Lapping synapses with galactic spin.
Enough to be breathing in and out
Enough to be watchful as sleepers sleep
Enough to shift weight slightly as the heavens wheel
Enough to know little, if nothing at all,
To rest upon the pulse and flow of veins
The warmth of cell and muscle
The opium castles of consciousness
(emperor’s clothes on a ghost of habit).
Keep dark the hours of darkness
Keep silence in the silent wanderings
The silent wings, the silent edges,
As silence is the only way,
The one sure way,
To find what becomes the centre.
simonhlilly 
Thank you for your visit to The Baby And The Bathwater. I appreciate it sincerely.
Your words are beautiful and comforting.
The darkness that you paint seems a safe and Peaceful one. One I only know in my dreamless sleep.
The darkness with which I am more familiar, where I spend most of my time, is quite another. A darkness filled with the waking nightmares of reality.
I go there hunting for demons, to drag them from the caverns of human iniquity, in hopes they will burn, once forced into the light.
Those hopes are most often dashed upon a rock-hard coast of willful ignorance or drowned in an ocean of mindless complacency.
If I didn’t have the soothing darkness of my dreamless sleep, I fear I would succumb the the other. And then my sleep would be dreamless no more.
This is lovely. Where the edges melt away is just a gorgeous line.