Take Them Back
Sat in a cafe, Saturday night, on my own waiting for the band in the wrong bar. Dark candles burn under the ambient jazz; the warm murmuring of a sea of conversations barely heard wash over me. I stir them into my coffee and practise being alone.
Fragments of words break out across the room: I hear but am already deep within elsewhere. People, safe within their groups and warm cameraderie, look with cold interest at the singles on the stools.
The sax floats above us all. The sax, it has to be the sax; nothing else can float and curl around the unlisteners and snare them with its tales of love, or the melancholy of its Blues.
Outside redlight bikes plough through the rain and smokers freeze as their grey death haze floats away into a night sky that watches us all; the lonely and the players, the drunks and those whose only purpose is to walk and wonder if the world will ever take them back.