Taryn Allan

Dead Dawn Dependency 

The urge to step out rises like a fever dream 
An infective sense of what a person does
The night there to be inhabited 
For the expenditure of youth
             And you alone
             With the ghost light of your cigarette
             Burning away from a balcony platform
             Straining against the imprisonment of self
Heed this call to discovery 
Though it comes without causation 
Where getting ready is a form of foreplay 
Leading to uncertainty 

          Outside 
                     Before it’s too late

The vastness of the night 
Restrained by the city-glow 
The non-dimensional Mundane Egg shell
Beneath which tower blocks fizz with energy 
Unpeopled booths of uncurtained office space
Making voyeurs of emptiness of us all
Those strip-neons flicker
Cinematic remembrances 
Of the stars whose light they’ve leached 
Burn the old constellations
Into your crumbling memory
           They’re taking that as well
           Eroding it away
           Through the developing muscle-memory
           Of micro-transactions 
Those stellar bodies
Cold astral corpses
Once guides for the weary
Are the only magic left to us
            ‘Here be monsters’
At the black edge of the street-lights 
The mysteries beyond the urban forest fire
Where Pseudo-Leviathan consumes Leviathan 

This atheism of the city 
First-and-only possible child 
Of the steel dome sky-mask
A dull reflection in pewter
Nothing more than a pareidolic face
The age-faded identikit
Piecing together of memory 
Which night’s awareness brings
In the palimpsest of history 
It’s corpses all the way down 
Transience the only certainty
            And health, a respite from the living sickness
Manifesting in the 
            Dead dawn dependency
The conviction that the sun will rise
            And imbue it all with meaning
A totemic rebuttal to the singularity 
            Of the ghost-lit monument of the midnight hour 
The hiding place beneath the city-glow
            Obscuring the true face of existence