We were drunk with heat

champagne edged, headachy

moving moodily like

sugar stoked children

bitten by yesterday’s sun

skin chapped to rose

lips parched ears straining

to hear thunder’s rumble.

Crescendo of kettledrum:

clouds scurry over Canary Wharf

I reassemble myself from bones,

sleep buried.

Grass now pregnant with rain

wind weaves spells into the dusk

‘Life is sunlit’ you said as you

emptied your pockets of us.

High in the turret of becoming

I laid my heart to rest

amongst the cobwebs & the

pigeon’s nests

watched the sun slash the elliptic

like a lover’s smile.

Let it all fall away

a river to the sea

my skin not now my own

my eyes belong to years

passed by, & my salt heart’s lost

in the storm of this

relentless.

Let it all become known:

time shape shifts body

from dust to bone to stone,

we are immaterial

we’re atoms bursting into light

for one Spring second

radiant.

You who are flown

like a Summer’s day

short, sweet. I’ve borne

the yoke of it, my sadness

is divisive, it fills

the room with clouds

bursting.

Let it all fall away.

I wash my hands of you,

watch the water swirl

the last warm part of me:

tide sweeps in again & again

whispering your name

without mercy.

As time passes

you fade into orange

London night: I return

to my skin, joyful at

finding myself.

It’s the way you slip

in, get underneath my

fingernails inhabit the

space behind my eyes

two fishes unaligned

pulling in opposite directions.

It was a novel experience

at the start ‘n I still crave it

like heroin, but heroin makes

me sick vomit up my life

benumbed in pink light

It’s the way you slip

in, get underneath my

fingernails inhabit the

space behind my eyes

you, so intent on intensity

I pop like a glass bulb.

It takes about a week

for the symptoms to

dissipate, I smile again

at old ladies, at grey

commuter faces.

Maybe ‘Boots’ could sell

a detoxifying lotion:

I could spread it on the sky

& hope you couldn’t

find me.

It’s the fear that overrides

oroboric  warmth collective

suicide, where egoless

we float until the end

of time

which brings me back to

………time passes…………