Jake Roberts

Steam breaks the illusory seal

Of calm, leaking from room to room,

Touching, as it goes, the seated ghosts

Who laughed, drank and mused

In this workshop of innocence,

This Russian-doll chamber where treaties

Or whispers fused, mingled and died. 

Rising through the open window to taste

The conversations of a thousand 

Nights before, when new faces

Clasped each other in delight 

And giggled with tipsy camaraderie. 

Quiet cigarette butts sit distant in-kind,

Soliloquies lost in each smoking tide.

Rising to the meeting place up the stairs:

Chapel for tired souls who outlast 

The bullish revelry. Here in daylight

We seek the same salvation;

Our enclave’s knitted hearth

Is company, a collage of people-past

Watch the scene from the gallery.

Through the mist, dinner for two or three,

We pilgrims, magi, who dine on talk

Await the plating of news we heard

Last week but need confirmed

And eat until our jaws ache.

The slippage of time, the wander back

Lit brighter than before our mass. 

Like homing pigeons, we loop to return.

Not to conclude, nor speak

A final truth, but to nurse

The warmth, the beginning, 

The Great Moving Upwards;

Nurse our joys, our untruths, 

Our temporary selves. 

Built to grow out of, loved in embryo, 

deserving of youth;

The end looms, we love faster.