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I move my lips without really even realising I am doing it
so there is something of him in the red of my mouth, a
vowel or hoo molten and coating. The voiceless ‘h’, exhalation,
reoccurs silently in my mind as if he were breathing over my
tongue. Hunky fusion machine.
Interconnectedness –
his cupid’s bow arching over mine, non-local particles
reacting, orbicularis oris phasing in, out, orbiting – is a kind of
physics. Interdimensional kiss folding in on itself like a star.
Supermassive neutron collapsing in hot gloss bomb colours.
Blood rich lyricism.
He’s been on my mind – live in Hammersmith 1973
pulsating in a cut-off unitard. His limbs are nebula-like; bars of
gaseous red under the gel. Blowing kisses, I catch one fifty
years on. This is for me, he says. By which he means this is
for me, Richard.
Inflections, mantle, his sexiness form a zodiac constellation.
7, 1, 83, Small Magellanic Cloud – of flesh. A piercing through
the red-black flank. Out of my head. I’m h-h-h-high on this
ventriloquism. Erasing. The lyric I is an alien. Pink river
dolphin chirping in syntax.
Jaunty piano sharps,
occasionally pentatonic, lighting up the auditory cortex like a
comet’s tail. Like ionisation. Neon red and lit from within.
His voice, a solar radiation. The tiny bones of my ears. The
belt, the parabelt receiving direct input. Fuzzy centaur.
I cannot adequately translate my mind’s arachnid locomotion
as it reacts to his song. Hibiscus-hued nerve impulses, a
miniature and internal lightning. The redness extinguishing
ambivalence is need. My yearning. A kind of gravitylessness.
Maronite electricity grazes the Kármán Line.
I ask my friend about his song and she says, oh I don’t know –
sexual healing or something. Shards of red howlite melt down,
are recrystalised, within the furnace of his mind. Space-red
rock. Lattice system aching, rebranching, stave-like. I’m often
moved, rarely healed.
I am night. Red night. My fooling mouth deciding on need.
Him, transcendent, guiding us around and around and around.
Together is no excuses. Together is hey, hoo, h-h-h-high.
My mind smiling now. Young and ephemeral amalgamation.
We hang above the lunar occultation of Mars. Strong. Defined.
I listen to Let’s Spend the Night Together
continually for one night so do we spend the night together?
His tongue, my ear disappear into each other completely. An
event horizon. Red luminosity humming itself into me like
quasar light penetrating the singularity. Aperture finally visible.
My imagination is quantum.
I am fragmented by resonances, intention, flowing from his
mouth and the associated Brownian, red, noise. Annunciated
waves that roll like firework theory static. That will not be
stopped on flesh. Fixated glam queering. A futuristic patina
scabs the wound.
Connection to him –
persona, lick of gas giant pink darkening to red – is a ghost
particle, unphysical state. Clavicle. Accretion disk. Red
mouth. Red tongue. Retrograde motion. The red dwarf of his
body satelliting towards me. Red life. It was such a clear
invitation to have sex.
There are worse fates than falling in love with a tightrope walker
but I don’t wanna hear em. My third wish was that I wanted
to be really, really stupid. And hideously ugly? And hideously ugly, yes.
Like statues offered to the dead, statues of chimneys, dreams nursed in the limited world, dreams
slapped out of our mouths like cigarettes in a dressing down –Hold on that expression, cut to the
window. Back to the bed. Arm draped across the balustrade. Deep in the gulf of vice and woe –I
dropped you off an hour ago.
We’re very concerned and amused by your actions,
a waiter eating our orders in the houses of illusion.
Let’s say you’re so lonely you hire a professional friend for £28 an hour. After several hours driving
around with him in a van, selling limited edition denim from industrial estate carparks to queues of
worried looking men, it occurs to you that you are paying £28 an hour to work. Worse yet he’s not
even particularly friendly – when you try to start a conversation he makes a little talking mouth signal
with his hand and shakes his head. So you ride in the back with the rare jackets and jeans, some of
which retail at thousands to the right buyer. They smell of oil, they smell embalmed. They have names
like Lost Circus and Instant Princess and Sore Afraid and Sufficient Boyfriend. At the end of the rail: a
pair of dark grey jeans with rusty studs and a patina of red dirt. The price tag says £15,800. They were
buried in the Colorado Mesas. You ask your professional friend why people pay so much and he says
They just want something real and slides up the divider.
The first thing a narcissist will tell you is that you’re such a good judge of character.
The best protection is total silence.
The difference between a smile and a grin.
The van has been motionless for some time. Your friend has fallen asleep at the wheel. You open the
back doors of the van and you start sliding the racks of denim onto the road, over the verge and into
the river below. You watch a bleach-washed jacket float away then collapse on itself like an ice shelf.
You must go and meet some real people – it was your second wish;
The first was to be lonely. An establishment folk hero
in the advert before the advert. But I do love life, I do.
It is possible, with a little discipline, to replace suicidal ideation with a long-term inner life as a space
pirate. Picture instead pulling back on the thrusters, the ship wobbling as it leaves the bay, leaning into
your massive chair as you cruise past Neptune, jettisoning eight hundred tonnes of nuclear waste near
the Kuiper Belt and then being gunned down by police ships. You ruined it.
It doesn’t matter. We’re all a little torn
between the sermon and the ode,
hagiography and reprimand,
It’s the same whenever we have the microphone, as if there were a record to set straight; let me tell
you about what he tells you about, what pleasures he shall ever find, his brands and sorrows. When he
wakes up he will scream, My jeans! My jeans! What have you done? And you will say, I had to get the
jump on you, I thought I did, I knew I did, I had to get the jump on you – besides, betrayal is so
beautiful.