Aubade Poem by Alan Gillis

The ambience of night creeps and swirls
in a haze through me, to sift and curl

in your ear as you drift into quiet
darkness, when I recognise it,

its qualming tones, for what it is,
and it holds me pinned in its icy hizz,

its nauseous waves of arrhythmia;
then I wake up in a clapped-out Kia

or junked Skoda in a car park,
blown litter sounding sinister in the dark,

and I fly for a nearby wood of yews
tweeting where are you, I have been true,

and how I miss the brightness,
wild strawberries, fresh watercress,

for here grow only yew berries and yew
needles and I'm failing to

follow the thread as I'm thrown
by winds over vacant city zones,

valleys of ice, razor mountains,
as if the earth had eaten the heavens,

gnawed to bone all I had known,
and I fly over dry reservoirs, blown

electrical grids, ash-covered campuses,
back to the yews dark as molasses

bristling in the wind like the pelt
of something surviving while rain welts

my skin, clouds expectorate,
and I hear the waves crunch and grate

a song of ice and salt darkness coming through—
if you wake up tomorrow it cannot be you