“Where’s my a thousand kisses?” he said

“Like you gave the Spanish poet?”

Urgently recalling the story

I must have told carelessly over a pillow

I said

“Maybe I was simply showing him how to count in English?”

“1,2,3 etcetera”

“Rather than showing the depth of my affection”

“Where’s my a thousand kisses?” he said “that you gave the Spanish poet in Ealing Green?”

I said “darling please know that you are loved but I’m 999 kisses short of loving with that ferocity and grandness,​ ever again”

“Sometimes a human being can be done with crazy love”

“Where’s my thousand kisses that you gave the Spanish poet in Ealing Green, beside the duck pond?

“It’s not a numbers game sweetness I must protest”

“Maybe I was just feeling guilty about not loving him the way he wanted me to”

“So I kissed him over and over like a hammer”

“Where is my a thousand kisses you gave the Spanish poet in Ealing Green, beside the duck pond, under the shade of a cedar tree?”

“Darling stop”

“Fancy passion is a folly so silly and eventually decrepit, merely a mention as a car whizzes by on route to the the big house”

“One kiss, curious and meant, is worth a thousand in Ealing Green, beside the duck pond, under the shade of a cedar tree”

“Why not wait for the one kiss that is meant?”

“Where is my a thousand kisses that you gave the Spanish poet in Ealing Green, beside the duck pond, under the shade of a cedar tree, that perfect summer’s day?”

“He was Spanish dear, love is a dance”

“And you gentle man are English”

“A thousand kisses in Ealing Green, beside the duck pond, under the shade of a cedar tree, one perfect summer’s day…would be akin to murder!”

“Now lay your bugged head down and sleep and forget the Spanish poet”

“He is probably writing a poem right now about the notorious Australian love bomber”

He didn’t lie with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed to just a mumble in his big ear

His yawn a tunnel through time

A window too

Took respite in a cave to ease his arthritic thumb

For many moons and one sun

For most of the Neolithic age

The immoral wakes

Remembers centuries as minutes but what is time?

Memory is a river that churns ocean to ocean and cascades into the bluest of space

Thinks, as one thumb circles another for maybe a week

Ponders, without a clash of eyelids for no one knows how long

Imagining a tunnel through a cave wall 

He might dig sooner or later

It matters less as he turns and sleeps some more

The immortal wakes

You can forget love, he told a beast that lay beside him injured from a great fall, perhaps from a higher cliff, perhaps from the sky

The immortal slept through the crash, the thud 

The dust cloud had settled by the time his eyelids like a cape on a bat opened wide and took in light

The beast could do very little but listen

The immortal wakes

He told the beast he had loved harder than the fall he’d taken days maybe weeks earlier

The beast groaned (so perhaps it was weeks)

He loved hard and deep like the tunnel he might dig

many moons ago

He didn’t lie with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed to just a mumble in his big ear

They walked across mountains and planes, her asleep on his back, in his pouch, on the crown of his head

Her mortal rhythm taps on his skin

Skin maligned with the scars of eternity 

Scars you’d expect, basins of old sweat, slowly drying up as he sleeps

They leapt like leopards until they flew like birds, he felt love was like that

leaps monumental and over and over until you feel like you are a bird

Across oceans they swam one hand digging through the weighted water striding onwards

the other keeping her mortal heart tapping against the palm of his hand held just above the water

He lay with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed, slowed to just silence in his big ear 

then the wind from the oceans, the very same oceans they once swam together, whipping across the earth

lifted the dust, the very same dust that surely settled upon his cape-like eyelids as they lay closed when the beast fell from a great height

became powdery blow on a brittle cave wall

he sent the wind back to the oceans with a scream that gave no one any rest least of him

until

upon a sleep he embarked to hold his memory of her in a thousand winter’s dreaming

The immortal wakes

he barely recalled the feeling of grief and why she was important

the beast smiled and asked, so you can forget pain but not love? The story of love is eternal not the feeling, the immortal said looking at the beast’s one lazy eye holding up

so joy or pain or even indifference is just evidence of love but the story remains eternal?

yes, the story of love remains eternal

the beast began to shake with laughter and wished that he could move closer to the immortal and breathe in his wisdom but he was broken or just heavy with despair, after his great fall

I shan’t ask how long you’ve been here then said the beast

oh that question is my favourite question

so?

forever and a day

probably he thought and smiled at the beast but for me it’s more about what I shall I do next and can I be bothered?

I know hurry as a concept but not as a compulsion

perhaps the last beast that fell from a great height told me

perhaps he didn’t fall and perhaps he wasn’t a beast but he did tell me about being in a hurry or she did, perhaps it was a she or a child, yet to to be either in presentation

anyway hurrying is not for me

the beast sighed loudly, the dust billowed and hung in the air a long long time

the immortal wakes

and realised that the beast was at the end of a love story, a great love story

A white boy born into a poor family must find it hard to understand the idea of white privilege

A black boy born into a poor family must find it hard to understand racism

racism is pain unheard and unwitnessed

class war

privilege is a mood not a status

black deaths matter

Uncle Ben scrapped its Uncle Ben on the front of the 2 minute rice something about a century old stereotype

Quaker Oats scrapped it’s Aunt Jemima syrup and pancakes, comfort food looking a bit like slavery

All this because a black George Floyd managed to gasp “I can’t breathe” in ear shot of a smart phone when he’s neck was being stomped on by a white cop

Token change, all ads up, I guess

Even the British Broadcasting Commission cast more black actors in it’s period dramas, to represent

Hope it says to each and every little black boy yes you can swan around in a top hat and high-buttoned, single breasted waistcoat one day

no matter how historically inaccurate

All this makes me feel like real change has come to food and TV

Oh here’s to Brighton

A town that says ‘do your worst’

Says here’s to the hug that won’t let go first, taking the sting out of signal failure at Three Bridges

Says here’s to the archers and all the weekend flotsam that washes up beneath 

Says here’s to the orderly queue of shit even deeper below, a feat of Victorian engineering

Says here’s to a grubby sunset and the whirling twirling starlings 

Says here’s to 11,000 a year at American Express, crisp and shiny in a Primark suit

Says here’s to chips and curry sauce and the crunch of leather jackets

Says here’s to pile-it-high roasts with all the trimmings and the gurning turning chefs with nicotine knuckles

Says here’s to the Steiner school kids and their lost ambition 

like mist drifting across the downs 

Says here’s to saying sorry 100 times in the Kemp Town Coop and the calming absence of choice

Says here’s to the wind between the tower blocks battering your London hair

Says here’s to a sun drenched nap, half way back to Hove

Says here’s to setting sail in a mobility scooter, “ahoy” says the fat man blowing along the prom 

Says here’s to giggling at the turnip palace as you pass the joint, resting your head on a soft white thigh

Says here’s to an overpriced painted rock and a passive aggressive sales pitch in the hallway of an open house

Says here’s to watching over us wise old channel like a tear in the sack of an eye ready to roll

Says here’s to the beach of misshaped hearts

Says here’s to falling asleep on the couch Sunday night and missing the rail replacement bus

Says here’s to getting here

Says here’s to never leaving

Here’s to the things we love

this year my scars spread like wild roots, scraping along my bones and sometimes knuckling through 

​my mane turned an old mirror grey

but I’m no horse, just a cart full of splinters and nails and warped planks

interventionist friends with blushing lips making shapes​ through the mist of red wine 

dinners of soft cheese on water crackers and to bed

and the clumsy hands of a stranger

always makes me feel better

This year my scars spread like wild roots

scraping bone and sometimes knuckling through

my mane a mirrorish grey

Interventionist friends

red lips making shapes but not a word sinking in

too much of everything, even advice

years months days hours wide eyed and wet in the middle

flooding the grass with grim reaped tears and teenage girl harmonies

down the farm wet shuddering despair full to the ear’s brim

every minor chord of gutting regret  

struck

I could never promise you a future a four am without fear

I belong to two islands a thousand miles apart with an epoch long aching to wander like a dog in search of a resting place to wheeze and fling one final critique on life’s superfluous complication across the polypropylene carpet

now you have a thump thump thump into the two thousand mortal coils and under you

his arms will unravel

my lovely sphinx forever buried in my dna fur snuffling truffling like the mysterious dancing light the tor presides over

right there in the murmur of an algae hue we lie

peace kindling, waiting for the wicker flames to rise

licking each other clean

the farm falls dim damp dark, exhausted from marching rites through mud and stone

the earth strong and loud, I squeeze his hand

and burn with hope and nettle

Crushing razors

To a silver paste

Suck it up

Slide

Thud

Shudder

Purr

Back to numb

Returning home

No longer sore

No longer raw

No shore

No end

To this sawing

Carpet ride

God the beauty

The beauty god?

Is this it?

Is this you?

If not

It will do

Boy

Waking

Eyelashes

Stroke my chest

I know he breathes

Leaving

His waving

Hacks and strokes my roots

I know he’ll be a house again

Bold and reaching for his place

A yard again

Lantana tangling like our history

Something died between us last night

A spark that once flickered turned to dust

It was Good Friday too and we hardly noticed the loss of what was once just ours and what is now every tale of missed passion

Our eyes agreed to the terms of our end, now more fodder for sad songs

A trusted friend made an observation about the need for our sparring,

You postured, I slumped.

Protesting too much I saw you

Self-conscious enough to tepid all your reactions to fill your wise I

But I knew the nose of our wine, the only other man that could

We said goodbye to great heights only seconds before not years as you insisted

I cared not and smoked against your will

For love is something that leaves me bludgeoned 

But the spark was cracking wasn’t it?

The old Italian in the restaurant saw it from afar and came running to enquire about our miracle

You assured him it was platonic affection

“Yes,” I should have said, “a spark not yet spoilt by love”

You can spend as long as you like promoting our ordinary alliance

I know you know we know of this thing 

our thing

And even if it’s dead now it was alive once and I will talk of it forever in fear of the silence confirming a myth that keeps you sure of your own paltry psychology

Even just to piss you off

One day you’ll realise reciting your truth

No matter what the risk or how tragic it plays

Turns sparks into fireworks