J.M. Jordan

NOCTURNE

The signs have flickered off.
The trains have settled in the dark,
and unmarked police cars slumber
in quiet corners of the park

The pigeons have found their minarets.
The bats have left their towers.
Machinery slows and stops in these
quiet unoccupied hours.

So step into the vacant street,
look both ways and stand
there in the night as still and cold
as the pistol in your hand.

Now pull your hood up tight,
hunch your shoulders and go
into the unmade world where silence
blankets the streets like snow.


Gerald So's YouTube video reading of "Nocturne":



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J.M. confesses: "I first wrote this piece without the third stanza as a kind of open-ended urban lyric, but it seemed a bit insubstantial. So I added the third stanza to give it a strange, darker tint - like Chekhov's gun with the second act unwritten."


J.M. JORDAN recently began writing again after a twenty-year hiatus. A Georgia native and Virginia resident, his poems have appeared in The Chattahoochee Review, Image Journal, Louisiana Literature, The Potomac Review, Carolina Quarterly, Smartish Pace and elsewhere.