So you twist and you turn as you try to sleep, and what stops you is some kind of fuzz; through a milling drone, an insistent tone, pitched deeper than the insects buzz. While you wrestle with your bed, it careens round your head like a siren - cum - warning sign, and you try to make out what it's all about

• are there words in that groaning whine ? But when you could kill ... it falls suddenly still ... Just the echoes of the crowds at the night races from far beneath the hill. In the morning you wake to the usual ache and the vague awareness there - by the cold breakfast plate, the five minutes late, by the way they don`t seem to care: by the chill in the train, by your slow running brain, by the flat of your greetings fall: by connections missed, and the way the talk shifts, by the nonsense you pass on the wall, by that unspoken no, - you half realise you know, it's just you never quite got to the night races, never knew how to go.

By the end of the day, your cares dont fold away with the neatness the others attain: and in the leaving race theres hardly a trace of the smile you sought to maintain. So you go for a drink and you try to think why that place isn`t quite where you fit; then it's home you go to exchange your woe and in front of the box you sit; watching pictures on the screen of the breaks between the actual meetings of the night races, the periphery of the scene.

And if you should start to wish for a part of the glamour, the wit, and the cred, of the people who know the right knowledge to show with each move of each aquiline head; of that place where your own simple style could be shown, to contrast the laboured device, of the changelings, whose airs, make a mock of your cares, in opinions they`ll never wear twice. Still it's no big surprise when you fail to rise, and search the streets for the night races and penetrate their disguise.

In some dream you may know of the emerald glow, of the scarabs on their crystal track; of the fireflies´ show, while the cordials flow, and the betting goes on at the back; of the music whose strains sing surcease to your pains, of the dancers whose every delight is to whirl away for a year and a day, in the space of a single night. But when the girl at the door turns and asks you for ... it's just ... you never got a card for the night races and you never remember more.

So you go through the reels of the clean machines wheels, and you work on its pads, and you work on its rails, and you usually sleep, and you usually wake, and you never know if it fails. You travel worlds apart, and you travel to your heart, but you never travel that far: and you generally know which way to go, and you more or less know what you are. And you fear it might fall if you heed the call - never knowing that it's only the dreams of the night races who ever hear it at all.

(Nov. 2001, © Alan M. Raphaeline)