Blackout

At some point, the power went out.
You thought you’d left your appliance

on, or the gin was wearing off. Still,
when you felt your way down the

stairwell of vanishing spirits
to see what all the din was about, 

passing from inner blackness into the
deeper blank of the inner west,

you still couldn’t see it whizzing past
your ears, nor the clear, high-beam

eyes of the local wildlife that’d crept
down eucalypts, across dewy grass

to the gaps in the fences.
The animals could see it though:

you, turned to stone, your kids
swinging from the power-lines,

and the atmosphere, alive
with evaporating sparks.

View this poem on The Disappearing »