The iron gates provided the back drop

to the sound of the saxophone

exploring its way up the hill towards

the rampant hostages of wine, women

and unlikely song birds hanging

in the explosion of Tuesday night

football and angry flash

points of possible danger and caress

driven anxiety; the odd yellow card

and scowl as the touch of thigh

through opaque stockings

was to some a thrill they were willing to chase

in the darkness of self deluded heroics.

 

The night air was blissful as the saxophone

groped for the right note in which

to spear a willing desperate victim,

to let loose with the rub of a pound coin

or at least find sympathy in the doorways

of Bold Street, the fine dining smiles

and the dead on feet undesired to whom

a simple hello was nourishment; the saxophone

the hero of this tale and not the player

sang with rumbling beauty

and side stepped anguish; it rose,

it fell in time to the heartbeat of those

that passed by, pretending

to ignore the decline of their souls

and the creeping dark over the walls

of the bombed out church

that suffered.

 

Blissful. Beauty. Bound.

Crawling into veins and hearts and stomachs

of the wary and the watchful, pulling

in a hidden ear from The Roscoe Head steps,

the unlikely willing quarry

of a taxi driver who turns his light off,

infused by a force he doesn’t recognise,

to call his wife and weep down the phone

about the loss of a sacred vow,

the once hurried walk of the teenager

looking to catch her last bus home,

stops and smiles, puts away

in her dust filled pocket and lint covered nails,

the letter she had written as she sat

at the back of the midnight special library;

her friend would last another day

and behind the railings,

that wall of silence with gaps of rage and fire

and sleeping grass, sits a woman, her head turned

by the saxophone’s belly brawl

and she falls in love.

 

Ian D. Hall 2016