ridge

The water looks enticing and gravity
is heavy tonight: inviting me.
Please dance in mid-air to see whether
angel wings hold magic in their down.
Or whether the pull of the earth
crashes, splashes before being washed up
on some eerie wharf downstream.

"Change?  Any change?" whispers the darkness,
deserting the sanctuary of bright streetlights.
A prick of pain bursts the moon's stare.
"For tea?"

We face up.
Two lives in wrong uniforms
that had slipped and failed to find costumes
that fitted requirement
beyond stumbling, ill-suited private plunges.

"Your face?"

A closed visor jousting through the night
in a land of armoured, upturned collars.
"I fell.
The scars never seem to heal.
No one likes me now.
Not now."

Sympathy brews in the black lapping,
as a miracle swirl of a swan's feather
holds afloat its drifting compass point.
A front of cracked scabs and hard crusts seep.
Raw wounds begin to weep, fresh and exposed:
no longer a barrier.

"Can you give?"
His voice - dry, dusty, distant - has travelled far
to deliver this moment of fallen innocence.
Our angle of repose is steadied and balances.

I reach out and drink in the dawn.
And give change I didn't know I had.