True Love Travels

What is love but a push in the wrong direction? We took a left turn, a right turn - whichever it was that sent us in the wrong direction.

And I was never impressed by horses. As I stood with you, once, on the laneside while they passed - my disdain, you thought, reserved for the riders. What was I doing there, anyway? Why was I out in the woods? The open air, the countryside, the animals - a similar stink.

We had, next to the fireside, a gathering of sorts, a sing-song as they told us, insisted that it was - we should all join in. My fixed grin, for hours, staring into the fire, praying it would end. Sea shanties, Irish ballads, English lullabies, Celtic madrigals, sung in fine and clear rural working-class voices by people who knew nothing of the working-class. I mean, nothing – not even of its myths. And the rural, the sheer nausea of it all, the lost maidens, the death motifs, black crows and stuff, birds in flight, ghosts - always with the ghosts. Drifting out over the fields, carried for miles.

We followed the flow of the river, climbed fences, walked bogs, fell in holes. It was, as you insisted, some kind of adventure. Romantic. Upstream, down dale, against the current, the fish, whatever. A meander, naturally. The river took us nowhere. We ended, for all the difference it made, where we had started. Across the water, the same bank, the trees, the lines of the bushes, the odd cow, sheep. Your trouble, you said - as you strode quickly away, the way we had come - is that you don’t like anything.

Girls on blankets, by the edge of the woods, just inside. On towels. By the bracken, next to the bluebells, the snowdrops. They lie there, these girls, gazing up through the tree tops, giggling at cloud shapes, waiting to be fucked. Made love to. Oh, if only, as your elbows press into sharp stones, the dents in your knees, the flies and the heat. You’re a sweater, after all. What does she expect?

Fly corpses in the kitchen. Dogs running around in the courtyard - noisy bastards, howling. Warm milk for breakfast, a push to at least appreciate the balance, the essential connecting link between the contents of the fridge and those things shuffling about outside. From this to that, it’s all part of some wonder. Except, of course, it isn’t. She mentions, again, your incompatibility, the likelihood of these tiny conflicts affecting your future happiness. Which is why you eventually point to the sky and remark, profoundly, on the beauty of the sunset. Right, she says.

What girls on blankets?

These girls are kneeling on blankets, caressed, lightly, by their short summer dresses. Bare legs, those tan-tie leg sandal things, small tattoos. They are, obviously, the very best thing about the summer. Lying next to them their bikes, hinting at summer thighs, the wind, their hair, all that. Blackberries tumbling out of baskets, half-finished daisy chains, small corked jugs of mead. Mead?

Before the night was through, the midges descending, de-swarming as the old farm hand said, as he passed and laughed, on his way to the pub. The light of the night shortening, the howls diminishing, a big long fucking fade into the blackness and the cold. Into roaring fires and tepid water, a night cap of some old shit, flavoured with honey, milkish and vile. Cold bed. Rattles and creaks.

She said, first thing in the morning: listen to the clops, the horses. Don’t you just love the horses?

Between Moon Dust and Wave Splash

Awash with the taste of my boyfriend I failed to care that yes we were men and in danger of upsetting (and maybe overturning) the various sensibilities that brooked no truck when it came to the issue of homosexuality and all its mad environs. Oh picture us there lips on lips eyes closed kissing like we’d never kissed before. My boyfriend said I wish we were here forever on this night bus hurtling through the something streets of Lewisham and beyond past the smoking stack of the peshwari Cutty Sark. The what streets I asked the what streets?

Through streets of south London the burning bins, the burning dogs. Wait, and the roasting chestnuts where, more campfire than camp, certain groups of scout leaders are taking charge of the whole children situation. You need to wrap, they say, your potatoes in silver foil. You need to sprinkle your chestnuts with honey or something sweet, or even the other way round, perhaps a twist of salt. The scouts themselves, gangs of them, make mocking faces, move their untroubled lips to the sound of their leaders’ endless fucking drones. Will they ever shut up, will they ever keep quiet?

What’s critical here, says Ben, is that we foster that feeling of unease that comes just before, and is often the spark for, the riots and the storms. And just what, asks Mike, are we fighting for? Fighting for? replies Ben, you must be mistaking me for someone else, yourself perhaps. I don’t quite, says Mike, understand. It’s fighting against, nitwit, fighting against. Fighting against? muses Mike, why are we fighting against?

Because my bootstraps were too tight and my brain was too small I ventured out on that sunny Saturday morning to the capital’s streets bearing aloft all manner of curious banners and slogans that betrayed my previous and oft-mentioned descriptions of myself as, in various times, a left-winger, a liberal, a good-hearted, well-intentioned doofus who knew all about soup and bicycles and how best to bring up children. I was even, for a short time, a fixture in alternative bookshops and poetry readings where I mingled with likeminded johnnies and took part in various sexual and liberating thingies that had the effect of freeing both my body and my tiny mind.

His eyes a reveal of pain and future death and in that altercation he decided to take his revenge or somesuch on the barrelling figure of the big fella who had diagnosed him there on the street as he prepared to stick a knife between his ribs, his shoulder blades, his gullet, his gizzard. Oh but really, he turned up later at the fella’s house and (rather gently, as it turned out) terrorised his family, fell down the stairs and tied up all manner of loose ends. Etc.

In attempting to pass off the poem as my own I made the mistake of underestimating the cultural intelligence of my listener who immediately seized upon the fact that the poem was, of course, not my own. We sat in silence for the next hour or so as he pondered my deceit and I pondered how on earth I would be able to worm myself out of this maddening situation where, yet again, I had been exposed as a charlatan, a liar, a huckster, a thief. You know what? he finally said. What? I asked. You’re a real fucking idiot.

That gap between the moon and the waves. I fill it. First with sperm. Then with spit. Finally with urine. It bubbles up, in the gap, spills out to the sea. A refreshment of new life and a boon to the humans of the human race. And to the men in the moon.

We climbed the celestial rope ladder, stopping off at the moon. There the moon fauna blended sweetly with the imported earthly vegetation that gave the moon its greenery and its scenery. And maybe, in time, its air. Sitting down among the rocks, our feet soaking in cum-filled craters, we marvelled down at the beauty of the earth and wondered, for a moment, why we had left it. Truly, we must have been fucking idiots.

Zoom in, quick, a whizz through the moon’s telescope back down to earth into the lobby area of the newly-opened Cheese Hotel that sits within the skirting board in a room within the Cadogan Hotel, Sloane Square, London. Greeted, first of all, by a mousey commissionaire who squeaks his thanks as you press a newly-minted cheese coin into his furry palm (do mice have palms, furry or otherwise?). You take a look around the hotel and see that it’s full of mice scurrying all over the place, like they do in mousetown, dressed in their various dopey costumes that mimic their human type counterparts. Which is to say: just think of a busy hotel and replace all of the people with mice. So you’re taken up to your room by the bellboy – the bellmouse - who also receives the coin in his palm etc. and scurries on his way. Wait a minute. What are you, are you also a mouse? You look into the cheese mirror and are relieved to see that you’re still you, albeit much smaller, much cuter. And your companion? Jesus, she’s a mouse. And you’re not going to fuck a mouse. Are you?

Awashed, I was also abashed, somewhat drenched in cum, reaching blindly, groping for the door. Not cum, liquid cheese, hot fondue. I should have known.