Friday Evening

Urban streets cluttered with damp-cloth-clad lumps of flesh sing speaker feedback into the screaming light. Shoe shopping. We try infinite stores, we hate everything (such are the pains of being elitist). Having spent a while cannoning sarcasm at hideous ensembles of leather and gloss, we step outside into a sudden downpour.

The lumps of flesh pile on their glad wrap wet dream dresses and stolen skins. We're quiet and still. "Let's go home..."

We latch on to one another and run through the sky-spit with my pretentious wool-and-cashmere canopy stretched over our physical identities. We merge for seconds beneath that cloth, an orchid flower grafted to a poisonous creeper.

The aluminum python stable is salty and humid. We say good bye beneath a war drum clatter on the plastic shelter. We hug. You wrap your fingers around mine. Fourteen-year-olds with painted eyelids wearing pseudo-combat boots stare, their brains visibly attempt to stretch around us. As grey tarpaulin is pulled over this beautiful sliver of nothing, we take our separate mechanical spike-slides, and suddenly I'm alone in a crowd.

Miles or meters later in the evening, the wet ground eats the soles/souls of my shoes and wears them down. Simplicity and joy are being funneled into my dark tunnels, making everything seem so much more profound. I'm in a dream world, and it's all real. I can touch it and reach sensation.

A sad excuse for a bouquet lies abandoned on the concrete, it's opaque pink duet feebly glowing, it's tissue and cellophane shell housing rivets of tarpaulin tears. Without knowing why, I pick up this lonely offering and hold it to my chest, as though to keep it's orphaned phallic symbols warm.

A starving artiste sits opposite me in the python belly. Reclining between my adopted blooms and my bag of essential escapes, I see that he's bending, long-suffering features lodged in a misshapen skeleton. I offer him the nod of approval. He returns it briefly, but then goes back to maintaining his metal slouch and poker face.

I want to get off where the soccer team are winding down, and walk beneath the soaring light-tunnel sticks on the artificially lit, lime bristle carpet, through sheets of darkness and melting-cloud-droplets. But I have somewhere else to be. Unfortunately.

I trip down stair-teeth as the python emits beeps. A laughing couple dripping endorphins follow, but they're oblivious to me. I revel in the anonymity. We turn to face opposite directions (as they are a single unit), so as I turn the corner, I'm alone again. I'm holding hands with cartoon flowers in a veil of warm, wet oblivion.