The Night of the Matador - draft 1

The pavement suffers the night's signature
Scrawled equal parts in haste and red,

A nocturnal incursion into the daytime

Where something had dripped, been left

Behind, from a portion of violence

Encased in leather or polystyrene,

Night's actions are some kind of theft

Leaving traces here, and there, and here
Signifying that something has been taken,

Claw marks on the doorstep,

Strands of hair on the chicken wire,

A marooned shoe, adrift in juices,

As I walk on, striding through the crimescene

Turning up the volume to drown out shadows

I am walking along the line of the punch
Traced like a sky-scarring vapour trail.
Night steals from us

All those hours and all that flesh

And I just don't know what's become of it all

And night steals that too,

Reasons and ideas and hopes and beginnings,

Night occupies these and reclaims them for itself

In the rhetoric of the bullfight,

Violent night, wholly night,

Has no qualms who it bites,

And in its cloak and with its dagger
Night reduces dreams to stains.