The Night Watchman

A combination of prose and poetry in a stream of consciousness style on the theme of The Night Watchman, a mythical being who represents to the author the governor of night. Since time immemorial, night has existed but its quality differs from the day; perspective is different, sight is significantly altered so other senses, which we tend to rely on much less, become more acute. This descriptive piece swims and oscillates between the more logical language associated with daytime alongside the winding and surrealist voice of night that conjures up all manner of images that defy the rational mind and takes the reader on a journey on the unsettling swells of a sea crossing, venturing into the deepest darkest unnameable.

The gunmetal lips of God spit zebra-like bullets across thecraggy moonscapes of our tubular mortal journeys leaving the addictive deceptive smoke of Nostalgia hanging like dead stars on a crescent moon Skeleton cigarettes of truths
that we inhaled and that
Our lungs and tongues will remember
forever.
The Night Watchman is a tatooist and his den hides in the soul of Man.

The Sun inspires the heart to speak coarsely like carved messages on the bark of trees Awkward angular beautiful messages that the slow tree receives joyfully and gratefully And, when speaking of blue skies, the imperial topaz jewel exists as an ever-inflating balloon whose optimistic beams float and rise on the compliments of age. But the Sun's many vanilla ice cream kisses soon melt... Upturning and prancing beams, as Inconsistent as jellyfish
Extending their chaotic orange fingers to the camera lens surface of the sea.

Does the Sun know what lies beneath the vast mirror?
Does she know anything of the flourishing inky trails of
Uncertainty and night life purging from the relentless black fountain pen of tide?
From behind dusk's tapestried curtain of dreams!

The Night Watchman appears as an illusionist
A wolf on rippled sand to which
Saharan winds are oblivious
from which the Monsoon winds flee
and to which the harps of occult dreams chime.
A billion petrol-black rods of the mind's eye
pray for the theatre of night to begin
The theatre that pushes the pen of the
Night Watchman
The narrator in the black fog cloak.

Tick tick tock the Grandfather clock
clasps in his wicked hand
The wizened crook of time and
Presents the Night Watchman as a magician
who pulls a slippery black rabbit from the hat
A rabbit whose eyes stretch across the endless
glossy ripe aubergine of night and
Whose skilful leaps and bounds unearth trinkets
of almost forgotten pictures that
dead sailors still cling to their chests
in graceful sepia-washed shipwrecked vessels.

The saturated sands on the seabed that drip, drip to the murk of a mythical distant coast for whom mileage, endless drilling and comical ocean vessels are entirely insufficient...
The Night is a distant galaxy, invisible to the naked eye; the Night belongs to the Watchman and exists nowhere except between
The grey gap beneath the sterile portals of logic that open to solemnly reveal that the blind tennis ball of Earth revolves cleverly around the Sun.

Lo! Where do we find the answers to questions that rise like smooth fatty cream to the shores of our tender lips?
Questions that assemble and destroy great cities of emotion within a blink of the Night Watchman's eye?

If dense rocks are to carry a more truthful sound at greater speed than that of the wandering cloud Surely the curious scientist will pray to become anything but air, swamped in the suffocation of space of here and there. Who is to grieve at this viking-like quest where the dumb tree finally finds its utility as a triumphant coffin, set ablaze on the crest of curling white waves?

Will the naive yellow and orange brushstrokes of flame carry, like messengers, The carbon answers that Man so bluntly and boldly craves?
And, wonder we if on the Night Watchman's lips should appear an echo of a smile
To save appearances of the celestial phenomena
A gesture of promise or mockery gleaned from
The dangerous secrets of Paradise. The cherubic embrace of a starless daylight, linen-white and crisp
Pacifies our weary hunting eyes and as Birdsong warms our hearts
The majestic choreographer appears at his pulpit like a red rooster
A blinding marigold welcome...
A laughable ball of heat that would fry us like eggs
if Galileo's spinning dream should ever
join the cobweb-encrusted library of archaic flotsam.
We know not of who we were but an hour since
and we are bereft of the possession or inclination to guess
Yet somehow the chessboard eyesight which we highly respect
has gained its Knight, Rook and Queen
And our twilight King, the Night Watchman,
is in check.