Poetry: Terminal Heights by Taryn Allan

Terminal Heights

 

A concrete overpass on the north-side of the city 

A non-place, like a shuttered house

Whose entry grants you wishes

 

Beneath the blooming veneer of the city glow

You could almost believe that were true

But it’s not just the hope which kills you there
 

We walked there after midnight

Extinguishing every candle before we left your flat 

A tender act of symbolism

For ourselves, if no-one else

 

The world, in turn, extinguished by the city 

Did seem transformed somehow 

As though it had attained some of its old mystic poiesis

The frost sealing the stars into the pavement
 

You said it was an affirmation, a sign

That the magic was already working

That the overpass was like a fairy-gate

We’d now started to push open

 

After the push, the fall 

After the fall, the endless uncertainty

 

 

 

 

 

Taryn Allan scribbles things into notebooks. Occasionally, those scribblings coalesce and have been known to appear in such places as the Horror Writers Association’s Poetry Showcase, Lycan Valley Press, Horror Sleaze Trash, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, and The Beatnik Cowboy, amongst others.