In the scathed a.m. you’re chemically
conscious, talking a noxious thirst, as we
strive Camden like a hanging garden.
Sunday morning. I say c’mon pilgrim,
and the new-moneyed streets wind us
an eyeful: Porsches and Audis, Toyotas
and Mercs’, designer deathbeds all.
The gardens are silent, centre-parted,
and tidy as Mormons. The thing about
symmetry is that symmetry is a special
kind of emptiness. And you make
a noise in your throat like a Commodore
64 – at the back of your throat – and you
bring up something the colour of rock pools.
I do not speak, but I know it then, I’ve seen
your doom. Walking, shoulder to shoulder,
there’s a pink tinge to everything. The sky
smells of spent fireworks and artificial
sweetener, sunrise sucking a bloody
rusk. A woman on the corner is doing her
bleached nut for Christ, says God somethingy-
something, and tries to touch your shoulder.
Poor cow doesn’t know, how you don’t cotton
to a festal Jesus, his denim jeans and three-
chord reefer blues. You cannot love her soft
rock Jon Bon Jesus; her wildly rhinestone
Nazarene, in mirrored shades like Michael
Jackson. You don’t cotton, and you won’t
cotton, and the mood gets ugly. You’re
letting her have it: the camps, the rapes,
the endless famine, our exterminated pedigree.
Your tikka breath a scream in her face, till tears
are aphid clusters at the corners of her eyes; she
crosses herself, and it looks as if she’s drawing
a razor over her throat. I’m not surprised.
We wade a burst main, take a side street, turn,
And turn again, and you are fine: we all went up
to the Mero, kicking litter. Yesterday’s news
is a body in a bin-bag, financial pandemonium.
By a plate glass wall you light up a sigh. Arm
in arm though an empty arcade: what kind
of delirious Croesus would pay two-hundred
quid for a tie? Fuck’s sake! We find the tow
path, make our way to mildew, drilling, tinnies,
a discarded dentists’ chair. A girl with a sour
face hands out condoms like condolences-
we laugh, crackle the Black Cherry wrapper.
You buy vodka and Blue Nun. Hunger hits,
and it feels like a puncture in the lungs. I drink
coffee; we sit in the sun on the damp grass.
The flat tang of caffeine, the bass in my brain,
like egg whites whisked in a bowl. And you say
home again, the stabbings, the traffic, the whole
shebang. A fox flushed from a green heap bolts
her hardcore headlong under a bus. A sinner, you
reckon, wiping your mouth on the back of your
hand, another poor sinner, making for church.