The Moon Did Spill That Night

I remember a place with a heart concrete that lived and breathed the night. It was a place that glowed pulsed in time with the pounding of the night's workmen, stewed in the warm, wet flood of autumn streetlight walks past stoops that lined the blackened stretch of tar sneakers and scarves so cool that they melted and smoked at the touch And from your window, you could see it all; you could see the birds and the beetles contented in their coats of cold, And you could see me stop every evening at the foot of your door and tip my hat to the wind that blew like lips to horn. Your window was a gateway to a place too good to live, too good to believe in, too good to taste and smell and touch when the sun was up and shining, for everything that happened happened at night, when the pipes lit up and the children's shoe-soles sounded loud and echoed proud through the alleyways, and the TV sets ceased their roaring for a moment long enough to keep the hopscotchers on their canvas-clad toes, and the radio merely tickled the air with notes of a blue deeper and truer than the vastest, most empty starless sky... And spilled on the sidewalk-chalked walls of brick and young love was a moon, a moon whose dusty, yellow glow was all that we thrived in all that we loved and hated and wished and kissed in, all that we sang and shouted and drank and pissed in, and all of us missed it when the hours on the clocks of dark dried up, leaving us with little more than empty gazes, empty bottles and empty beds, empty arms and empty heads, promises broken, desires unfulfilled, but with sweetest day dreams of the night to come.