Wednesday 2 March 2016

Untouchable

Untouchable. In your badger-skin vest, I see you moving through a frozen landscape, surviving on roadkill, earthdirt and diesel. Your breath in the cold air still capable of melting my hot-wired heart. The bodies of moles sag from barbed wire. A crow bounces on the snow. Haemon, son of Eurydice, how very like a God you seem in this dark place. Humpty Dumpty, teetering on the brink, desperate for love but too weak to enjoy it. I think of myself kissing the hem of your garments, sucking out the car fumes, the dirty power of you. Illuminations flicker in my mind's eye. Music static mistakes my shaking chest for a heartbeat. Nevertheless, somewhere the truth  flashes on and off inside me.
You move along the edge of the wall like a dog on a carcass, getting to the place where I can meet you. It's high time, you tell me, and a warehouse falls apart in my head. Walls collapse into a slow rain of soot. Parked cars burst into flame. I can fix it, you say. Fix it so subtly no-one will notice. And here you are, singing love songs to me in the dark to the tune of Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. It is both creepy and erotic. I push my hands into the junction between your own ghost and your flesh, and long for it to be a day again, like any other. Like all the rest. Haemon at the mouth of the cave, my loyal retainer. Made of heart and bone; made of gloss and treebark. Let's make a new history, a new mythology. Just one more time. Take me down.