Nighttime Stroll

How important are reflective, contemplative, and calming experiences for individual growth? Is the modern world priming us to need more of these moments or less? Is self-doubt required for personal development?

Escaping, dinner passed, into that final frontier,
Skull-bound in chains of senselessness shared:

Gutter hovel in-gathered gloom of shadows loom — this weave of night
Bidden, verily smitten as young lovers — an apple first time tasted
That hissing, sibilant silence at edge of twilight lurking
It is here, in these moments entranced, arrived I at this destination
A culmination of stagnant, soupy dreams and ambitions laid low by the rot of time
This casual stroll down still lingering streets, steps rocking cadence:
A smorgasbord of memory flickering out of tune
Here in the calm, heady bosom of gloaming night,
Wind-sipping beneath summer leaves: a time for thinking
An inward glance, a matter of scales measuring the darkness amid the light
Above, the scattering of stars, as good deeds upon a sea of azure and midnight hues
Some masked by cloud-quilt gathering thunderheads
A soppy message delivered in the morning.
All this: a reflection of my eyes in window glass
At last! A shuddering of these burdens, as inward slips askew that sprite of surreality
The cowl of midnight dreams supplants all the length of scrollwork inked
A lifetime etched and furled

Thankful for these moments peaking, backwards seeking
To unmask that face before me, mirror-bound

William T. Blackburn struggles still to find his car keys in Ohio (USA). He holds a BA in English: Writing and Music Composition from Westminster College. His work appears in SCRAWL: 94, Emerald Press, Route 7 Review: 6 & 7, Edify Fiction: Teen, Thirty West-Weekly Degree 6/19, The Blue Mountain Review 16, fws:journal of literature & art: 2 & 3, Paragon Press: Tales of Reverie, The Anti-Languorous Project: Soundbite 4, AbstractMagazineTV-Contemporary Expressions, Soliloquies Anthology: 24.1, and Poet’s Choice. Newer work will appear soon in Castabout Anthology, Please See Me, The Rainbow Poems and Ricochet Review 8. He contributed to Adirondack Center for Writing: PoemVillage-2019 and 2020, and Riza Press/Pen and & Paper “Giving” anthology.