Her milky white calves sit like marble between slim trainers and smart black trousers, wait patiently above the petals. She rests (the week is long). The asphalt colours green and blue with the passing of storefronts. His Lycra-sheathed legs pump up and pump down and then wait too, suspended as ahead green turns to orange turns to red of a bloodless sunrise. Wind ripples the sides of his high-vis jacket. For a moment, metal bikes grey with the a rising tide of London soot, rubber wheels slick with morning rain, two arched backs and four tense forearms are parallel, caught in the stream at the same time. Then she brings her shoulders forward and one foot down (the other foot up) and lazily leaves him behind.
0 Comments
there are five prawns lined up on the black plate charred tails spooning each other when I suck the heads they flatten, like paperprawns the saltiness drips down my chin onto fingers from which I have bitten each and every nail. there are two of us, so when it comes to the fifth and final prawn we slide it back and forth across the plate – yours, mine, mine, yours, yours, I know you love these prawns, on the menu as scarlet prawns, sixteen pounds for five little red exoskeletons of salty longing. today I held your hand and now you tap my leg and you say please, take it its yours. When I leave the house and step out on the doorstep where only a few days ago a mysterious shit appeared and then disappeared into the bins of the restaurant downstairs run by the perpetually running couple, they don’t have menus there just blackboards which she leans up against an extra chair next to your table and holds upright while you make your choice as she watches, the wind takes my breath away. Not surprise or wonder, I knew it was windy because all throughout the sweatstained night the wind tore at the roof and struck up song after song on the loose metal sheeting on the chimney, but it takes my morning breath away by sheer force and whips the breath away from between my parted lips and slaps it away into the day. The gulls don’t seem to mind and they sit and screech contently whatever the weather may be, maybe. I walk to the station and I think I am walking fast enough, no bag today, a defiance not carrying excess baggage deliberately underprepared for the day to come, and I am passed right and left by sort-of neighbours in a hurry and I can’t tell whether they are late to work or this is their normal pace their normal attitude clenched and tense and ready to shoot off, in a haze. Already I am distracted. I enter the elevator and I check everyone out willing them to look up at me but they don’t, the golden rule for private space in the public space is keep your eyes to yourself. But yesterday I broke a rule briefly made contact on the train, I finished reading the magazine and put it behind me on the gap between seat and window and the lady across from me (behind, across, on top, next to, commuting is nothing if not elementary) held out her hand and said are you finished with that? which was enough of a cue to hand the magazine to her, say yes of course! too loudly and with too big a smile and spend the next minute-and-a-half wondering if they all thought I spoke too loudly, that only happens on the Saturday night train, drunk people speak like that, was I drunk and where was my bag? le petite mess - like la petite mort except it’s the face you make when you come to realize you are a fucking slob. from the bike-path, a glimpse: one-woman dance in the frosted dark of the corner-pub garden. a flutter, a blink, an orange night-sky. I put up my boundaries & my boundaries came down - a whisper from beyond waves, in a language I don’t own. Spoken from lips I don’t recognize. If it had told me to run, I would have run. But it said: stay. she broke the seal of my fingers & revealed the life inside: the smudge of brown-blue feathers, the strain of orange in its beak, a tiny thrumming heart resting against my palm. || the postal services deliver forty packages per second this christmas season || george clooney supports coffee farmers in jardín, colombia || when they told me you were dead, I was wearing frog pyjamas || would you like to buy children’s toys? || a war criminal hears his sentence and drinks poison || ariel 3-in-1 pods smell like the alps || please consider donating your stem cells || north korea has launched a missile powerful enough to reach washington dc || the corn was orange in the firelight, but we were looking at the stars || they drugged the churchgoers before they threw them out of the plane || i think i miss you, but i’m not sure || mladić’s prison cell has a view of the ocean || fly to florida for only five-hundred euros || it snowed at your funeral, the nightsky was white || sperm whales sleep upside down, their head hanging in the ocean's hollow heart, each turn of the ticking tide met with clicks carrying across miles. and yet we pretend to know what vastness is. she played the harp but that is all I remember of that time. dark streets ate up our footsteps and cold wind closed our mouths. |