Night Watch

Time is elastic, its zenith fit to breaking

when you wait for the ambulance – now leaning over him,

now rushing back and forth from house to street straining

for sirens, night so dark and wet and quiet out there.

Listening for breath in a slight boy of fifteen years

is an ancient art requiring silence. Kneeling on your hall floor,

ear right to his lips, beside the frenzied shouts of his father,

whose panic of pacing is the only thing he can offer him.

Your own son watches his friend from the corner,

slumped, slightly beaten, the first fire of alcohol seeming

less necessary than it might have been, not worth the effort now,

while the friend he tried to carry home lies on his side, still.

Slapping his rump to try and wake him feels like assault.

Strange to be able to do things he would never allow,

ice you run across his cheeks a cruelty. Beyond limp,

he will not jerk away, open his mud-brown eyes.

When they finally come, wearied knights of the new wars,

they cannot rouse him, tell us it’s not good, open his lids to pupils

so huge, so pitch and utterly void, his mother gasps, sinking,

and you never saw anyone so unconscious who wasn’t dead.

You make your son sit and watch. They strap on an oxygen mask,

fail to open his mouth for a tongue block, quietly ask what he took –

vodka yes, but weed? pills? needles? No. Just vodka. Straight.

‘He was kicked,’ your boy says, ‘they punched me in the head.’ And vomits.

Clipped on a stretcher, they lift him out of the hall. In the long night,

fourteen hours twisted in tubes before he rouses, you remember

they loved pizza by the swimming pool for the last three birthdays, watched

videos, Xbox, played Star Wars with Darth Vader the only enemy –

and when you turned sixteen no-one had parties at all.

Robyn Rowland