Poem 174

A third of our adult lives (if we’re lucky) we spend unconscious beside someone else, simultaneously together and apart, sharing space breath sound and touch but each busy with our own distorted echoes of daylight life and stress/anxiety dreams …

… published in The Listener … a lot of water imagery here, from the swimming through sleep (constant choreography of those time-lapse overnight videos of people in bed) to fishing and being trolled through sleep as twin jewellery-like lures, to blue jellies which are not gaudy desserts but the bluebottle jellyfish of our quotidian concerns …

… the extra space between apart and together in the penultimate line is there to give both a sense of being ‘apart together’ but also of the sleepers moving/dancing/swimming repeatedly apart then back together through the passage of a night …

… the final more landlocked metaphor I intended to refer to the company of thieves among whom there is no honour so they’re all ‘alone together’ – but could also be an image of two hanged criminals swinging on a gibbet …

All Night

We do all our synchronised swimming
in bed
           all night we're trolled through
different postures
twisting in the current like silver linked
lures with garnet eyes
heavy with situations
anxieties plugged to our chests like blue jellies
      and hair caterpillared with sleep
shoulder to shoulder we dance
apart  together
all night like thieves