A poem by the Danish poet Michael Strunge (1958-86)

The Machinery of Night

Slowly the night is charged by the city’s lights.

The star buttons blink

and on the moon-screen the first images can be seen.

Oh, I am lulled as on a steamer,

a heavy express train through the dark,

fly high in the Machinery of Night.

The clouds of dream-steam

whisper whitely to the earth.

The Machinery of Night works away, absorbing human souls.

The dark is packed tight with a buzz of energy...

I am at a concert in the Machinery of Rock.

The week’s survivors crowd around the small stage

the air is hot with music.

We are in trance and urge

transcending

the boundaries beween the sexes,

between dimensions of reality,

dancing in trance-formations

somewhere in the sleeping city.

We are exhausted little angels

with wings of future-song,

with the child in our blood and a fag in our mug.

Our skin is of the frailest dream

and our hearts gleam brighter than neon.

We’ve been blighted by the harsh lights of day,

bleeding pink snow,

speared by newspaper headlines.

We are a part of the Machinery of Night

transform fear into friendship.

We wear our brains with pride

exchange dreams and cigarettes,

fill ourselves with ecstasy and music

change sex and masks...

Later we go home our separate ways

pass through the Machinery of Night with new identities

along publicly determined routes.

Large black lumps of sleep fall

from the oil-sky into our eyes.

We fall asleep as single-cell organisms

from the time when the earth was sea.