The year in half

That winter he was constantly startled by the early advancing in of darkness, effaced day after day. It hadn't been half an afternoon yet but the space of daylight was vortex-ed by the onslaught of last night's recycled blackity. It saw him getting into cars, whirling through swing-doors, kicking at the crowd before him. It caught him on the gradual gradient up from Underground above and alongside windows and dry estates. Constantly startled because the back of summer he felt was still propped up against him. Had the stilted months between then and now really conclaved this ill-fitted winter around him? How his handsome days of length were now swallowed up by Autumn's premature, gluttonous castration; it all traveled away too easily with an indicative reticence, into a reigning winter evening. Dry-in-seconds home towels were now the washing-up cloths in the local dryer, white wine (bottles of the stuff) became cosy still rum, huddled in groups on stones- now huddled in packs around invisible cylinders in passageways (six O'clock/the burnt out ends of smoky days). He looked at the change in company around him; in awe of the subtle specter of the quotidian. Smiles like facts, snatched from the damp sand that the somnolent tide of warm months had left to fade and dry.

O.Wilks