Ghosts Making Love at Night

I

Sometimes you want the night to last forever.
And you want there to be a silence in the streets,
so that when you walk them
surrounded by empty locked-up shops
and homes and apartment blocks
you feel like a ghost in a romantic hinterland.

The streetlights set the stage,
casting this pool of yellow here
and glittering with air motes there,
emphasising emptiness.

Cut loose from the moorings of your body,
the fat man's limp and waddling gait,
you can be so many things:
ethereal, and beautiful,
and young, and old,
seeking your lover's solace in the cold.

II

You can be me,
and me can be I.
Promoted from second to first person.

My lover waits halfway down
a narrow residential street.
He is like a natural fact,
and I walk into him
just as a prophet might walk through a wall.
Without shame or mortal flesh,
weighted with drink and food
like rocks in the suicide's pockets,
we find somewhere warm to make love.

As ghosts, we drift inside
a shut and lonely house.
He leads me up the stairs and to
a bedroom fit for married types.

Though clothed, we don't undress.
The gestures tell their own tale
of submission; reception and
pleasure. He turns me over and
our transparent outlines
are shaped in give and take.
The symbol is what matters more
than skin invading skin,
the giving up of self
to one you love's intent.

III

The animate spirit is pulled towards
a final conversion.
Invisible muscles contract,
a slackening of tension comes
and washes over me,
and in recovery, we laugh
at how no residue is left
even as we thought we'd fall apart.

A tree in the garden spreads
its branches and
is run through with streetlight.
I too am spread
and like the leaves am glistened with
a sight,
a vision lighting up the night

which sometimes you want to last forever.