Saturday Nights: They've Changed

Allen Ginsberg once proved that poetry could strip away every mask, exposing the raw truths of loneliness, longing and survival. In that same fearless spirit, S P Clark's latest poem, Saturday Nights: They've Changed, invites readers into one man's darkest evening, where cheap wine, empty park benches and fading hope become symbols of something far greater.

Written in uncompromising free verse, the poem embraces vulnerability without sentimentality, allowing ordinary moments to carry extraordinary emotional weight. It is not an imitation of Ginsberg, but a contemporary echo of his confessional tradition, blending stark realism with vivid imagery and an unflinching examination of isolation, identity and the possibility of redemption.

Readers can expect a deeply human journey that begins in despair and ends with the smallest but most powerful of victories: the reminder that even when the light seems to have disappeared, one act of kindness can be enough to make someone believe in another Saturday night.

Saturday Nights: They’ve Changed

S P Clark

Sat in a park on a Saturday night because money’s tight and friends are hard to find – hard to keep.  It's my fault that I’m drinking cheap wine from a bottle on a park bench alone, pretending to be happy in the dying light, filled with rage and untold hurt, with desperation seeping through my pores.  Desperate to find a reason to exist, to find a new soul to love and one day miss; desperate to reimagine myself, reinvent myself as someone, anyone but me.

Sending messages or calls for hope; finding ways to let them know that today is another day where I’m struggling to cope with all that I’ve become, all I’ve said and done, all the joy sucked out of fun, out of me, out of hurt to where I long to be.

Another Saturday night where I can feel the eyes of strangers judging me – some old drunk – some eyes with sympathy, they’re still grateful that they’re not the one whose only help is his pen and paper.  But they don’t realise that my ink has dried and I’m just scratching my goodbyes into the page that no one will ever see, ever get the chance to read.  So I drown in wine and smoke the cigarette butt from off the floor and watch the pigeons flying to their nest.  They know home is where they belong.  Where did I go so wrong in life? Where did I go so wrong in life to dangle choices on the blades of knives to be cut in two?  I am me.  The blade is them.

This is not the way I used to spend my Saturday nights.  I’m like a Tudor home with modern windows – nothing seems to fit, something’s out of place.  It’s me, me who let this happen, made it happen, forced this to become my present way of living.  Living?  I used to thrive and now I’m outdoors but trapped inside.  The prism of the rays on the clouds is the only light inside this cage.  They make a rainbow on my bottle as I drain the last drop.

Somehow now I feel much worse, no wine to hold in this crowded isolated universe called pain...shoulder to shoulder on the ground; my heartbeat is a fading echo of the one that thundered loud before.  Saturday night’s ain’t the same, and it’s me who has to accept the fault that points its bony finger in my direction.  This is my fourth death, I doubt there’ll be another – I’ll get no resurrection.

Then a glimmer of hope arrives; an old friend who actually knows me, knows the me underneath the hurt, beneath the disguise, behind the shell of lies and reminds me (although I’m surrounded by the needles of slurs) that someone cares…and maybe next Saturday I’ll get another chance to peer through the darkness, open a door and become the human I used to be.  The one who smiled at his reflection, with sequins in his pupils and glitter in his glabellar lines.  

© S P Clark