Pas de capital

On monmouth street, the devil lingers

smells the blood of things to come

fingers dipped in black magic

cigarettes and hashish on a double decker bus at midnight

feeling muscles pulled tight from dancing for hours

they left their bloody conscience by the door, it stuck, it did not close

well at all

wanting sex and drugs and and end of time

condom wrappers litter festival floor like signets

her father invited different women each weekend to sample

his sorrow and she

climbed down drain pipes to go where all

kids without structure hang

an empty playground with burnt spoons and plastic needles

the boys there, let her be, they liked their meat less

tenderized

one year she read eighteen plays of marlow and

three anais nin, the latter had her wet and thirsting

but the bathroom door possessed no lock

wax your legs, but not your crotch, the feminists at

night-school implored, she was one of them but not

able to summon the desire to behave well

where do night birds go when they want to devour?

Different to everyone here and the same

a pulse urging movement, willing escape

fucking strangers without pronounceable names

tight buttocks, red hose, patent shoes, broken heals

against radiators leaving stripes down her thighs

such is the transpose and yield of hormones

one day you’ll look back & regret will not be what you see

sleeping on fur coats in the dressing room at 23.00pm

platinum hair on your lapel, can you survive her

blistering disregard or is it what you want?

Sitting cross legged eating tinned asparagus as he

jacks off to henry & june, the part where uma thurman

and her incredible triangular breasts, reach

lighting up blunts on promenade des anglais

grinding hips in la croix des gardes after the gates are locked

no protection, you’re already ruined thrice over

with someone who leaves you before they’ve begun

your grandmother is jarring jam from fallen fruit and she accuses you

of stealing her cigarette money which you did not do

you were out in the garden playing in the faraway tree

eating scabs and letting the neighbor undo your shoes

they fall like birds wings without bird into pond

once you drove your bike into that water and leaches

left their love kisses on your arms

like that boy who fed you clafoutis, calisson and cough candy

when you ran a fever and he sucked on your flat bosom

like starving tight rope walker

running down le suquet in search of brown eyed kids

to buy alcohol and pastille du mineur, danging white legs

and tanned toes into dirty water

one said; You are too flat chested I like them bustier

you smiled in relief, punched their thin arms and ran off

secretly desiring the older sister who stood silhouetted against

setting sun, darkness of her skin reflecting thrashing waves

like she had been born from the urgent depths

her lips large and angry with her age, gauloises yellowing

hardly smoked just flung from painted finger to finger

you longed to reach underneath her blouse, to

black lace, brown skin, white lines

on her dressing table, saints, glaring disapproval

she liked boys with mopeds, tight jeans, long hair

no matter how hard you tried you could not

interest her apathique boredom into desire

instead punishing yourself, with last minute trains to other cities

necking at le grand rex, with sour tasting boys

who supplied black smokes and soft necks

in the darkness of raspoutine snorting on her thigh

leading to empty windows and

the feel of late summer on clammy nude skin

he tells you to close the curtains, watching as you

turn, slender and warm, toward him and away

mother at la main bleue, her own lithe figure

sharpening history, walking into rooms without

locks, a family legacy.

In tenerrife they say without a tan, stand outside

too young for adults, too mature for boys

an urgent pulse, the stage a bouquet of bodies

a turkish man gives me a rose, says I remind him of

sissy spacek, I lend

a blushing danish girl my last pesos, she

returns an hour later and shares a lemon ice

her long tongue licking it between smiles

it’s midnight and the buses run by the half

in earls court where whores and rich men

laugh, knives on board better to walk

he’s holding me up, he’s holding me down

we create a child, we lose ourselves in curling throng

when I see him again, it’s ten years later

his black eyes have bags underneath, he looks like he’s

been carrying grief for the children of pont des invalides

to battersea bridge with green birds no longer there when

it was cold and her art in the water lost

nobody but I believed it happened

je n’ai jamais voulu être blessé. Je voulais être aimé. Violemment.

now she has a child and I ache to hold

onto that time with

both hands.

The Eclectic Lucozade Acid Test

I woke up in an unfilled grave; you were licking the morning dew off my face and I thought it was 1953.

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A wise man once told me, “Never write about your trips,” in the same way that people say you should never write about your dreams, because no one was there, no one would understand, no one cares and (no matter how precise your descriptions or how excellent your storytelling) no one will ever see what you saw in the way that you want them to see it. And this will ultimately frustrate you, and force the words, “You had to have been there,” to pour out of your mouth before you’ve had the chance to cram them back in. Then you sound like an utter dick and it’s too late and nothing good has been achieved. But then, I argued, what the hell did Kesey build a career on? The wise man was silenced. I wrote notes about my trips.

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FRIDGE-FREEZER

We went to the construction site/fly-tipping spot behind the pub. It was dark but Venus followed us, the eye in the sky. There was an abandoned fridge-freezer laying pathetically on its side. We opened the doors and were disappointed that there was nothing exciting inside. We wanted there to be a suitcase of money or a severed head or a gun or a baby. Instead there were only some crisp packets, empty bottles, old newspapers and a used condom. The disappointment on my face must have been palpable. You took off your boot and produced a pack of tabs from underneath your insole. “Classy,” I said, while you hopped about. “You game?” “Always.” I stood on the fridge so I was eye-level with you. You balanced a tab on the tip of your index finger and said, “To fathom hell or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.” “I already know hell,” I said. “Well then, you’ve got nothing to fear, my little angel.” You put the tab on my tongue and we were off.

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MOVE

Some general merriment ensued, we went back to the pub and drank tequila, there was an incident at the kebab shop, then we carried on drinking at the working man’s club and I beat you at pool but then things around me started to move so we made a move.

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TAKE ME TO CHURCH

Remember those evil gargoyles at the church? How they were alive but couldn’t leave their perch, and one of them spat at you? They wouldn’t let us in the church: we weren’t welcome there, we were too bad. They snarled and clawed until we were out of sight. I remember we counted, and there were 12 of them, 3 guarding each corner. We seriously pissed them off. I’m surprised they didn’t eat us alive. I went past that church last week and it doesn’t have any gargoyles. It’s not even remotely Gothic in style. Also, it only has one clock face, not 10. But there were definitely 12 gargoyles. Or perhaps it was the tequila.

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MR. GANESH

By the church it started to rain. The rain hurt me. The drops were hitting me and going through my skin, then either coming out the other side of my arm or staying inside my body. Like acid rain dissolving a statue. It wasn’t horrific but it hurt and I didn’t like it.

We ducked into Mr Patel’s corner shop. He said, “I’m just about to close,” and you said, “We just need orange Lucozade. Not the red one, the orange one. It has to be the orange one. I need it. It’s very important,” and I said I only needed cigarettes and a purple Ribena. “Very well,” said Mr Patel. Behind the counter stood Mr Patel, and behind Mr Patel there was a colourful, A4-sized poster of Ganesh. I don’t know how but suddenly the two beings merged. On the poster was Mr Patel’s shrunken head on Ganesh’s body, and Mr Patel was handing me my smokes but his head was Ganesh’s elephant head wearing a magnificent gold crown. “Anything else?” asked Mr Patel from inside the poster. “No,” I said cautiously, passing a tenner to the life-size Ganesh who was standing behind the counter, wearing Mr Patel’s clothes. I said to the poster, “Mr Patel, you are a God amongst men,” and he chuckled in the way that he always does and told me to clear off and stay out of trouble.

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HOME

The rain stopped and after we walked for what felt like two years, we got to the cemetery halfway down the hill. We were welcomed there with open arms. I remember you saying, “We’re home!” and grabbing my hand, and your palms were cold and sweaty but I couldn’t have let go even if our lives depended on it. The trees knew our names and the dark clouds kept us warm – we wore the sky like a cloak, draped around our shoulders, billowing behind us as we played among the graves.

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INSTALLATION

We wandered around the oldest graves but I knew that there were no bodies there. I explained to you my theory, that these crumbling graves were actually an elaborate art installation that had probably been created by a local artist only last week because they knew we were coming to this cemetery, they knew that we would come home eventually. Because people always go home, eventually. “This is just an outdoor art gallery, not a burial site,” I told to you, with absolute conviction. You bought it, of course.

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CHIMES

Lots of graves have little decorations but the infant cemetery has plenty. It seemed like there were at least one hundred wind chimes on each tiny grave. They were loud, the only thing we could hear, but not in a deafening or annoying way: the sound was just beautiful. Those gentle chimes dancing in the breeze played for us a lullaby, written, performed and orchestrated by the stars in heaven. I have never heard a sound so pure and I doubt I ever will again. It was truly a magical set of sounds. I lay back on an old brick wall and your drummed your fingers on my rib cage, playing me like a xylophone, accompanying the clinks of the chimes, in harmony, so heavenly.

We heard wind chimes following us around for weeks after. But, in reality, when the colours have dulled and your shoulders have regained all that weight they’d lost and you’ve repossessed your worries and cynicism, the twinkling of wind chimes just makes one think of baby-sized coffins and dead children. (You got me a wind chime for my birthday: I daren’t hang it up).

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KISSES

You kissed my skin all over but it was the most asexual thing. There was absolutely no lust or love in this closeness, there was no suggestion or motive, it was kissing in its most basic form: simply placing your mouth on me. You said I tasted like vanilla custard, “proper, bright yellow custard,” you said, “not lumpy school-dinner custard.” My mouth tasted full of fizz. Not champagne or soda or sherbet, but the sound of fizzing. That was it: all I could taste was the sound of fizz. Time for another tab.

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THE BIRDS

Your hair felt like feathers. I wondered if you’d been a bird in a past life. I guessed you were a game bird, a grouse or pheasant. You said, “Maybe that’s why I’m so passionately anti-guns.” At the time that was the most profound thing I’d ever heard. Now we laugh about it.

Above the wind chimes but below the blanket sky, was a murder of crows. We discussed how excellent that collective noun is, along with a parliament of owls, an unkindness of ravens and an ostentation of peacocks. Corvidae are my favourite group of birds by far, and I have always felt an affinity toward them. These crows were so very powerful. They did not seem sinister or ominous at all, rather they were our guardians, our protectors. We knew that nothing bad could happen to us under the watch of the crows. They were truly superior in every sense, majestic even, and we felt enormous respect for them. We discussed going to the Tower of London to see the ravens but the last train had been and gone. Suddenly I saw yeomen warders hopping about the cemetery in their full regalia, picking at the grass for worms, coins and stale bread. All of their faces were the same, like the archetypal beefeater carbon copied to create exact clones – like whatever you’d imagine a beefeater to look like, that’s what they looked like, times ten. They didn’t bother us at all. But they wouldn’t have, not with their masters circling above us. In a fantastic turning of the tables, the yeomen were bottom of the pecking order.

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REALITY

After this I lost a few hours. I can’t remember anything noteworthy. I know that it got very cold and that we went to sleep in an empty grave. Upon waking the next morning, I knew it was 1953. I have never been so sure of anything in my life, until I climbed out of the grave and wandered around. If it weren’t for the twos and ohs on the headstones jolting me back to reality, I wouldn’t have known any different, and I did, for a very slight moment, think we may have woken up in the future. My green scarf was discarded a little away from our sleeping place. You saw it and thought it was a snake. You liked it. I let you keep it, as a pet.

We walked down the hill, bedraggled but full of new thoughts, to the cafe for a fry up. We walked in near silence. I took that to mean that your dreams were as unnerving and terrifying as mine were, and weren’t something to be discussed for fear of bringing the other one down. Or maybe you didn’t dream at all. But anyway, a wise man once told me to never write about your dreams. So I’ll leave it at that.