darkness approaches, 
a face I know well
shadows, touching, whispering
the dreams that fail to absolve
our sterile streams
the empty seed crushed
the genitalia reformed
as we worship the urinal liturgy
written on segregated walls

I light my last cigarette
fighting against the cold air
to keep my only heat smouldering
billboards proclaim "you're in Bluewater country"
but this city is too cold
its river frozen and too its soul

I cry out to night's solitaires
to in unison reveal their broken dreams
cut by the sides of rusty Gillettes
drifting like the smokestacks exhaust
of carbon monoxide its cancerous cocktails of chemicals
drifting scattering infecting with every breath

3:35 am, corner of Exmouth and Christina
still a few cars roam the streets
the red rich woman driven caddy
lights against her all the way
her back seat coloured in seasonal display
the lights should know her importance
she impatiently waits for their change
to slide her away.

the Holmes Foundry worker
ending his shift
black from his labour
cursing the lights
consciously or asleep?

a little while ahead the overpass appears
beside the frozen athletic park
where lovers, young, are pressing
each to each, in their nocturnal devotion
above the black snow sided
king's number 7, misted in holiday neon

one can see clearly at this hour
the sorrows and the shadows
as the night walkers dance.
trying to make sights into poems
trying to remember the painful details

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Joseph A. Farina is a retired lawyer in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. His  poems have appeared in Philedelphia Poets, Tower Poetry, The Windsor Review, and Tamaracks: Canadian Poetry for the 21st Century. He has two books of poetry published ,The Cancer Chronicles and The Ghosts of Water Street

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