20.08.04
Battered by Typhoon Megi: down the hatch with candles and food in tins and comics and china cups. Which idiot…don't s let's just cower in quarter ruin confuse ourselves for the love of love and money don’t say it don’t say it
there, you said it. Pour Martinis ignore signs light Camel Lights…no more. No. Shut up about it. Ssh, now. Shh. This intimacy can take us over. You can take over. When it gets like this, I imagine things. "I know you have something to prove." I do not. "Whatever form it takes, whatever shape." It's time. It could be. It's very confusing. Lend me your limbs. Let me touch them. I've missed it. I've been looking forward to this for
well actually, no. It was a trawl, a long haul, with legends and tall tales and time turning. The journey had its own long and dreadful detours. Had to get out: asleep and drooling over Claudia Cardinale when the muse shrieked like a shrike, "Get out! Get out! Don't be asleep at dusk, tsk tsk, it'll give you a headache"
so I took flight, tern-like, to my perch at Trinity Lighthouse. "Heart's in and out of it". Hold still. Canada Square, Citigroup and HSBC light from root and core to tip with blue red white halogen and neon. Flocks of geese return from the Arctic and stream past the Dome (still there, tense and empty, waiting to be filled with cars or munitions or chemical weapons). The water soft blue, the evening sky fierce and flamboyant. Silence and boats filing past: boats out of pictures, trawlers and rusting ferries, yachts and quick canoes, had as much reality as
a crane picking up trash wires and dead electrical goods and dumping them in a barge. Or the Excel exhibition centre next to glassy, glacial Royal Victoria Dock, like Iceland industrialised. To Cyprus DLR in Zone 3 with no ticket. It's all new travertine and aluminium and uPVC with a sparrowhawk weaving through streetlights and swooning over arches and overpasses. Return to East India, where it's friendly and the views are beautiful. I must have mentioned this most dynamic element and some vital force buzzing between all the little windows and the romance between tower and tower, the vibrations they exude, with all those garish bulbs burning like hot blood cells. It's a caress, a nighttime thing, flirtation, an ineffable seduction. By the side of the lighthouse, with geese on migration. Heart fallow and all of that!
seconds ticking on and too much of that to escape with cigarettes left, thankfully. Flats recede into their own diagonals and claim perspective from afar. There is a centre square still empty. A dead swan, floating. A mast of willow and weed and the smell of heavy rain laced with thunder. I felt hassled by charity. I felt for you. Get on a bike and stay alive. Spider plants burst over the top of sills. Wooden totems in a restaurant window and Krishna with heads brimming radiance. Chinooks and Tornadoes roar over roofs and leave black fumes and ringing peels knotted up in aerials. A white Christ in a red brick niche says, "over here. Come on, come in. You know you want to"
no way! Reeking doves splatter buses. Citi Quays say "why not you?" A car exhaust left to rot on the pavement like a lung. Stars above railway lines. White trees with gold leaves. Bins for shoes and textiles over spill. I just said to you what you said to me. It's simple. It's simple. In Jubilee Place shadows are cast along marble floors and shoe heels ricochet down empty halls and glide past glass walls. The sunny side is good for success or silly jokes or hope.
At Bethnal Green a bouncer died. There were tear traces marked in sooty signs to commemorate a face full of fist. Thwack! They scrubbed grease off the pavement and made it as white as plaster of Paris or clean bed sheets or lilies. Petals filled the street: the wind whipped them up in little whirlwinds, mixed up with property pages and personal ads and other litter. The bins, meanwhile, were gaping. Sin nestles. Right now is good is good, ja. The orchestra, though, is exasperated. We're closing in on September too fast.
