The Age of Electricity

Already we’re those creatures our grandparents would not recognise – the
children of electric light,
of nights on the town, of the thousand bulb
fairground waltzer, waterfalls of neon up which appetite thrashes to mate.
How many of us were conceived not in the tactful dark, but…hey,
leave the light on – born a bit more knowing, just because of that?
Don’t you feel it fizzing in your chromosomes, those tweaks of the helix,
filaments of what a darker age called fate?
Or see its blips on the cortex,
eyes closed, or blindfold, sparks like static prickling your inside night?
No escape from it now, not even if a sneeze of solar plasma ripped our
grids and stamped the grand marquees of glow above our cities flat;
our bodies won’t forget. Age ten, dared to it,
I lick-tipped my torch battery
terminals; it’s still there, the squirm of small volts on my tongue, fizzle-sweet
like dangerous sherbet. Or, age five, marooned by lights-out: I’d
forgotten how to sleep. At last, my mother took me out to meet
midnight in person. Streetlights clicked, zizzed, off to on, as they saw us,
pavements shivering awake. What
kept her walking, the two of us walking,
me almost asleep and still walking, beyond our own or any street
I knew, I couldn’t say. I huddled close in the long-ago-mothbally dream
of her beaver-lamb coat
that smelt how forever might smell. It felt right,
to be walking, on, on, out to
the ends of ourselves and beyond, out of sight.