The Clockwork Sea

The sharpened angles deny peace. Wonder through the hospital corridors in twilight. No-one here. There is no sleep here, or rather, there is sleep, but no dream. No voices and no echoes.
When I walked home tonight, the sky was a nightfall-blue, cold and curiously spring-like. The street lamps came on, slowly it seemed, and the air was surprisingly mild.
It rains when I am not here. I return to pavements full of reflections and everyone wrapped in coats in a way that people used to thirty years ago. More even, if I am honest. Waverley Crescent echoes. Red phone-box doors and the green typewriter on the lunchtime news before the childrens TV shows.
A sigh of resignation and expectancy. An anchor wrapped around a suitcase, thrown in the grey-green seas. The kind of sea you might find in Worcestershire on dreary spring days. That sea is everything and there is no tide, no current, just an endless reflection of an iron-grey sky that has forgotten both sun and rain.
The clockwork starts to tick again.
I always knew it would.