Poetry: Dark At The End of The Street

© Alessio Furlan via Unsplash

Dark at the End of the Street

We’ve had some fun

but our story is complete

The moral knife still twisting deep

That improper thing must always be beat

So, you turn your back

and off you creep

Promising me each memory

you’ll fondly keep

And with my battered trust

and my itchy feet

how firmly you believe

I’ll casually retreat

back into the dark

at the end of the street

We knew the rules, we knew the game

and still we had to cheat

We wrote through sun

and rain and sleet

We thought ourselves immune

our passion so discreet

now the choice is made

we casually hit ‘delete’

You’re so sure

my heart won’t miss a beat

we blackened many notebooks

we tore out many sheets

So much goes unsaid

those poems stay incomplete

All filed away in the dark

at the end of the street

Do you think me as some devil

replete with tricks and treats

it seemed like art at first

something so unique

An open mind, an open cage

a bird that often leaves

And yet here we are again

that same story on repeat

What made your soul once leap

now feels so obsolete

Was there always something missing

a fatal flaw in this conceit

It no longer matters

our time, we did deplete

my footsteps fade into the dark

at the end of the street

Where I feign my understanding

and wrestle with relief

Peering out

through the dampening eyes of my defeat

I’ll fold myself so small

my vanishing so neat

I slip from this scene

back into the dark

at the end of the street…

Tomas Waters is a writer and poet from Yorkshire, England, and is inspired by the great lyricists of the last half-century. His writing interrogates human relationships from all angles and touches on current affairs and observations on life and family. He has a poetry book (spanning 29 years of writing) in progress, which is due for release later this year.