what you play at night

You never came off my account

and I never asked you to,

so there's a small circle with your letter in it

sitting under mine, every night.

And I can see the lot of it.

I don't go looking. That's a lie.

I go looking about twice a week

and I come away worse every time.

What you play at night.

Half of it came from me.

What you play at night —

and lately there's things I don't know.

There's a whole run of something on there

I have never heard in my life,

and somebody put you onto that,

and I know exactly what that means.

You still fall asleep to the slow one.

You still do it at the same hour.

And I lie here at the same hour

being kept awake by the same thing.

What you play at night.

I can date the two of you by it.

What you play at night —

I knew before your family did.

The new stuff is not the problem.

It's one I put on for you in a car once,

badly, as a joke, at a set of lights,

and you have played it nine hundred times since.

One night it went still at eleven

and stayed still, and I understood,

and I sat up with the light off

like a man watching weather in another county.

What you play at night.

One tap and it's gone forever.

What you play at night, at night —

and I haven't done it, and I know exactly why.