Darknight

I have walked down these alleys before. Each corner has known me at the midnight hour, alone and brooding, hands in pockets, head bowed, deep in thought, trudging from home or towards. A solitary streetlamp illuminates some and some are dark but that does not mean much. Light is essential when people are around or the threat of them. In silence, one finds darkness the better companion. The mind is free to ignore objects that arrest its flight, bringing it down to earth, making it the slave of ponderous, transitory phrases. What in the brightness of the noon-sun gleams, glitters, causes the eye to waver, in darkness ceases to exist, swallowed up in the oblivion to which all things unseen by human eye are condemned. This state of affairs I prefer in my midnight rambles, far from the madding press of people and things in the daily world. Aimless, the senses silenced, the mind wanders at will as do the feet, looking for nothing and finding it near the edge of existence. Yet not all who wander are lost; but come back in time to where they left from, refreshed from encounters with remoteness. I return too to the cycle that bred me, that feeds me, that will throw me away, in time, for something better; and I want to return too. For the absence of meaning tires as much as too much of it does. A night is only so long and, at daybreak, I have to take my place in the ranks. I will not be missed but I cannot have my hands in my pockets nor head bowed when the sun finds me. It ill affords me to let go the dire moment that separates me from non-existence and I do not. Dark alleys are better visited when it is dark.