Sunny South Kensington

And still you wander, past Sunny South Kensington, on battered soulful tracks, I plead and plead relentlessly but cannot articulate struck by croaking distance. Limbo, I’m back. Limbo, I’m cracked, I’m creviced. Limbo, cup me, pack me into boxes, into mugs, into you. Limbo, you dreamstate, let me sleep on you, with you ,again. Eat and sleep in my lungs, bulge through arteries, spit cholesterol, cut me off, eyetight, with all that might, under luminous alleys, a mad man going through mad doors. More facepaint, cloaking clownlike eyes, sad. Cracked tooth bash against mine, I beg, bulging beauty splash dance with my fingertips again, skintight. I promised to make you a blanket of these pages, but you’d still shiver to the bone. You creep and creak, gazing from pavement’s tip, where you’re yellow. Come join me in Limbo, where the knees are sharper and the barks more acute. There’s no thump around here, no bumps of folly, but featherless webs, fishnets even, to hold us, wavering, hovering, ever-dreaming.

But, I’m blue now. I’m lagoons of it. You threw me here – why? I’m blue now. I wanted yellow, and vague forceful promises, reassuring frantic nods of you. That’s what I wanted. To eat you up and throw you up and take you up with me on rooftops to scream and scream and scream and tell them all they knew nothing.

On all these squares you dare, you dare – we’ll never go back to that café again. Or all the pavement blocks you broke my heart on, all those ones that gave us bad luck, three in a row, I warned you, didn’t I? Past the station, again, again, and up the road where I sinned once more. We went back to that place, again, again, again, we’ll conquer them all with Lego bricks remastered, to melt them leaving plastic smells of colour , to build you a universe, build us a bed, build us sheets and sheets of muffled laughter, mortal heavens for non-believers, all these things cannot – must not – exist. If they did, you broke them indefinitely like chocolate bars in Tesco’s which you thumped with your thumbs. It’s not Cordoba, it’s in my mind; there’s no such thing as time, no such place as London. CCTV caught us that time, at the back of the bus, they’re everywhere, Cyclopes eyes, once blue, once green, ever-changing, the other buried beneath beige pillowcases.  And Peter’s Street where the alarm went off, on and on and on, and back again. You punched fanatically, punch into button love, modern music box, just punching ad hoc codes. Mad, raving, delirious city, come back. Come back and gulp us down, chewing all the while, limbs entwined with herd and flocks of homeless wailers, feet bent by bluish bikes. You led me to all the places in the world, but always the same, routinely and relentless, only once did we hop on and shut our eyes tight, it seems a wretched shame – to never be so reckless again, just, here, hover hover, full of maybes, of caves, so full of monosyllables and words that make you afraid when stared at for too long, whole worlds of these words, staircases of them, tube maps pointing the way to them or to all kinds of Angels. So this is it, maybe we’ll wipe the slate clean together, on our knees, or become elbows in an old woman’s dream, in some grimy home in Pimlico, with all the other mad ones, sad ones, through mad doors. The dread shakes us alive on rotten carriages, grey, to home, where you once took me, avoiding glaring traffic angles, and we shivered moving together in frozen drama, slower and more acheful than we had once been. Batter me, bruise me, plug me into walls, tear my narcissism apart and crouch in its dent, smiling urgently.