In These People's Eyes

The fireworks in these people’s eyes light up the room. Someone jumps in, off the sofa, and steals the very thing you’ve been looking for, for an hour, right out of your hand and disappears into the hole in the room: The blind spot where people are lost and never found, forgotten (to an extent) and never remembered by anyone, least of all by the friends you think they have. A plethora of memories and thoughts can rush back at any moment and a year can pass (or be recounted) in a single breath; the depth and breadth of an active mind dosed-up, will confound, trump and triumph those of the greatest thinkers of our generation. You know everyone and all of their vices. But there’s nothing up the stairs, other than R. and A. and a whole room of people, you politely refuse and head back down (for you know what will come of this) towards the living room, and still the persistent crack-and-psssssssh never seems to cease.      

Quick-Talking Homeless Stars

My red and white shoes flash in circles, faster and faster as I move across the canal upside-down and gunning it. Will can’t keep up. In and out and in and out, across, over, around and down and up and through, past all the magnificent sinking and bent brickwork buildings, with wide windows and never-the-same faces. I speed up, and the clicks grow louder, the buildings bigger and the mouths wider, I speed and speed until I reach the city square where, I hit a little fence, and the bike and I smash right into the floor.

‘Are you alright?’ a redheaded woman says.

I satisfy her qualms with a bloodied grin for I can't begin to vocalize how much fun I'm having. I survey as the hipsters play their cards and read Kafka and smoke cigarettes or spliffs, whilst the juggling unicyclists hassle bystanders with talk and tricks and kids play amongst the pigeons’ shit. At one side the national monument protrudes, in all its phallic glory, to commemorate this or that and some Great European War. The quick-talking homeless stars assemble at its foot, giving sexual health advice in exchange for change, or a minute of your time- they’re modest folk really, and stylish too, they give the square that resonant air of wisdom lacking from so many city centres.

Bicycles

Centraal Station, and blue and yellow trains lined up, electric skis, in a massive dome-tunnel with a hundred thousand eyes floating across the jutted steelwork. Boots echo louder than the trainers do, but high heels reverberate (clack-clack clack-clack) against the platform. A gang of suits fall out in single file and march, tipping their caps, and unsheathing their umbrellas, ready for an onslaught, though the pitter-patter of distant gunfire trickles down my neck as I reach the exit. It is beautiful at a glance; the water is careless and walks quietly through the scene, the buildings askew, auburn and elegant against the grey, and Spanish guitars play across the wind like a whisper from another place. What marvelous people! Though busy and concise, a nod of acknowledgment is not uncommon, and I feel should be duly received.

‘Welkom!’ Say the shiny white teeth. ‘Welkom!’  

I close my eyes and listen to the city- I hear trams crash in the distance and a drug dealer’s song, I hear, a lighter crack and the ‘ding-ding’ of a hundred thousand bells and then a voice, familiar.

“Ben!”

Lacking.

Unfathomable, irreplaceable, incalculable.

Where is it?

How do you even define it?

Eclectic exuberance or some sort of chemical ebullience.

Perpetually potent yet waveringly illusive,

Frivolous even.

More so than any narcotic-concoction.

It’s like ecstasy, just without an elegy.

One hundred percent pure,

-Naturally.

Travel.

 

Thrift.

At the fifth thrift store I found her,

The serendipitous whore.

Sifting pissed through unwanted gifts,

We kissed, and fucked amongst the dust.