For Them There's Nothing
--Mark Waldron

They can never ride from Karlova Ves to Spitalska,
watching other trams and pale stones of faces

sunk under the glass; they can’t have an itchy insect bite,
an awful cold, or let their sleepy, humid gaze

rest upon their feet beneath the water in the bath.
The things we make, the TV shows that leave

these muted traces of their colours on our clothes,
the foreign films that float below

the stripped out letters of their subtitles,
the songs we listen to and sing, none of these are for them.

They don’t go out to eat, not even in the sullen,
almost empty cafés, where the world’s bright juice

runs in hell-bent rivers between and through the tables
and shines on the floor and goes out onto

the green-grey street where it will rain later
and the false ceiling of cloud is lit from above;

they can’t go out into the garden and turn to look up
at the curtained windows of the bedroom;

they never smell the plain wood of the boxes
we install them in and never even see the only true dark.