The Wind Outside

is like a barrelling tubetrain with failed brakes.
It shakes the scaffolding's bones. It's Charlton
Heston rattling the bars at his jailer apes.
It's wind with its hair down, wind with a hard-on,
with nothing better to do. Town-crier,
'the end is nigh'er, headless horseman, failure.
It's Brando's big scene in 'A Streetcar Named Desire',
vertigo, chimera, Ahab, drunken sailor.
It punches the tarpaulin and gets tangled in it.
The fight lasts minutes - the thug wind wins,
marches past the window like a carful of soldiers
crossing a trapdoor, beneath which, for minute
after minute we lie, clenched tight as tins.
Then the wind jumps off - and blows out - and smoulders.