From the Finchley Road to the Grosvenor Embankment

Out here in the suburbs of the North we suffer under incredible delusions.
We are tickled by cats being walked on leads
And silly stories about the Names of Places and old wars.
You were hallucinating a small blue biro line.
You saw it on my neck, behind my ear.
Then you saw it all over the place.
You went off following it as I knelt
By the green Brazilian Mangoes which are not,
I suppose,
My favourite and anyway,
You have a sunburned back and routinely walk into people
And some of those people became excited
When I stopped to consider various types of Kitchen Knives.

But I didn’t mind at all because I was starting to have
A Wonderful Time.

Everything looked broken-up,
Atomised
For as far as I could see.
Everyone was still on the phone,
Pissing me off as they shouted down the line
To call centres
Who Cannot Hear Them Anyway And Besides
There Was Vivaldi being played down the Line
As if on whistling needles which had been found on the beach
Of some deserted seaside town.
But who was I to complain
When the Japanese fashion-designer girl from upstairs
Started throwing her urine from her window,
The one above mine,
Evening and morning,
Sending it hard splashing down on my wide stucco ledge
And spraying onto my bed.

Her urine smelled, from two inches,
Like rubber remnants on a hot road,
Acrid like that,
And I wondered: is this it’s Fresh State?
Close in, the real body waste
Body-expelling-what-is-bad-for-body smell came out.

An inch!
My nose an inch only away from her Kidney Juices!

At that inch, I gagged.
The body cannot and never lies.

A friend suggested that it might have been Apple Juice.
He said that he had been fooled before.
If only he could have knelt with me
On the window-side of my bed,
On that Piss Altar with me, sniffing at
The Apple Juice of Chiaki
(for that is her name. Chiaki is Piss Girl’s name!)
Then he too would have gagged at the one-inch mark.

Let me hear no more foolishness about being fooled by apple juice!
More fool You, Peter!
Do you suspect every liquid, from Clear to Amber,
To be Urine?
What kind of world can that be?
Where are my spectacles,
My goggles, my instruments of measurement?
Do you want Argument or Augument or Unguent?
Is Humous really fake tan, a little joke from Lebanon?
Is Taramasalata really a pink, fishy moisturiser,
A little joke from wherever it is from?

HAIL, MIGHTY UNGUENTS OF THE MEDITERANEAN!
WE, WHOSE EQUI-DISTANT MATERNAL ANCESTRY
HAVE CAUSED US TO BE BALDING (yet virile) YOUNG MEN
BOW AT THE UNWORLDLY ORNAMENT OF YOUR ALTAR OF OINTMENT!!

But you know there was something else I meant to tell you.
The supply teacher, whose time was up,
Shouted loud: Release Yourself!
At me as I rounded the corner to go,
After all,
Just home to get away from it all and when I asked him
Why All The Shrieking, he said,
BECAUSE YOUR HANDWRITING IS
ALWAYS CHANGING
AND HAVE YOU (at the end of the day)
NO CONTROL OVER THAT AND
WHAT ARE YOU DOING
AT THE WEEKEND?

I was too tired from kneeling at the Altar Of Apple Juice
To affect any kind of Comedic Doubletake and
Have you noticed
The Sheer, Skinlike Matte-Finish Beauty
Of those Heinz bottles of Apple Juice for babies?
Anyway, that man
Was like the faux-marble tiling of a Youth Hostel shower cubicle
(but where would that hostel be?)
or a jogger with a delicate nosebleed,
Gibbering also words in rhythm from within,
The Words rattling out of himself
With the pulverising of one of his knees,
The one on the other side
From the delicately bleeding nostril,
The words moving with a jismatic elegance which
Clearly helped his mind to unTANGLE.

But tangled?
I’m not sure
I trust these loose and supposed problems of the mind.
Just cough for the Doctor!
Show him your new Teeth and wait
For him to open his tin of Smarties!
Ask him, upon leaving,
If there’s any chance that you might be allowed to
Kneel at the Pissy Altar
In order to get a sense of
Something new
if not fresh
Of something genuine
if not genuinely pleasant.

There were peasants
and hyenas outside his bedroom.
Yes. He saw them through his window.
Men in nightshirts pranced on greenling hillsides.
Seemed like they were running away from unsaddled horses.
Such weirdness. But that's not what he thought.

What was happening?
Just the crunching steps
on the gravel path to the door of another vampire movie?
Just another tracing of the path of Zosimos,
frozen-bearded relic on an andventure?

We don't know
And we are tired of listening out for the old goat's bell.


Has anyone seen my goat, by the way?
I'm sure I saw his beard pointing over the water.

Leaden, William proceeded to clip wings.
The green was full of them,
Horrible, writhing pinions describing all God's directions at once,
Sending up a stink so powerful it became sound,
The sound of the One Name:
FILTH!
He set to his task, teeth irritated by tuna strands,
The bagel having been too sweet also,
Causing him to retch as Wing Juice slithered, steaming onto his ballet slipper.
Poor William, they thought,
The others who had gathered to eat by the Kirk,
He'll never get that done before he needs to be back at his desk!

Javier was lost down at Middle Temple.
He asked for the venue of the marriage of Squaffle Horse.
He was faced with fifty-two identical buildings and laughed
starry eyed
At the foolishness of what he was doing.
Having composed himself, he asked a porter about the venue.
The porter looked at him with such suspicion that Javier laughed again,
Laughter becoming dance, gleeful and terrifying.
In the end, he had to be restrained.
Luckily, the area was crawling with policemen in disguise.

The peace of a week deepened, shattering and shattered
By long grasses and low old fountains,
Recumbent newspapers and supplements
Just touching in the shade of an Alder,
The best bits being shared back and forth
In that unusual shape of time of day,
Indwelling quietly wondering admiring wondering
Until the flags are up, cooling in the evening
And time has come to go home on soft tyres.