The Moth and the Candle

Streets of the empty line the maps
Portraying the city as lived-in

Light flows in smooth, straight lines
It illuminates the mind for a single moment

Huddled together, crushing for warmth
The group shivers and twists in anticipation

The sounds and smells of ten thousand war machines
Invade my solitary head an pervade all my dreams

Following the last as the one before
Travelling in a well-worn direction

Recognise your own utility in the hands that turn this page

Bursting pain, flashing lights and strange shapes
The senses subtracted by one

There is a man with the pain of a thousand years
Listed on a face haggard with the suffering

Before I was blind and now I can see
Before I was weak and now I am strong

Detailing a new panorama
Or spelling out an older view

The blank disc spins, round and round and round
Crackling but discernible the sound pours forth

Future lives of our own
Past deaths we have known
Shimmer in the distance
Like so much background noise

He was found more dead than alive
But one was there to live and to thrive

A symbol it is of times past, gone and forgotten
A symbol of a once mighty empire now well in decline

Growing up, side by side, neighbourly
Friendships tested and evolved in a shared sense of place

Simple things simply put
Turn complicated in an instant

Liberate me from the dross of commercial excess
From buying things I can’t afford and don’t need

We each send signals to the observer

In blood and death they came
And for blood and death they stayed