Dominos

You're a sweetheart, you're a creep.
You're only just nineteen for God's sake!
Like the lost negative of myself
You're still somewhere under my skin.

I keep coughing you out at every near-crisis
To remind myself how bad things
Could get, to ward me away from such fires
And romances.

You were my religion for a while;
Glowing and captured and nutured. I could receit your antics for hours
With frenzied eyes and virgin soul
Hungry for more. Your chaos satisfied me

In a strange, twisted way. I lapped it all up
The way a bright, promising, infatuated child perches
At the feet of their anarchic protagonist,
Absorbing every tale, even if spun from nothings

And so full of danger, its as invisable as air!
You were some sort of fractured example; I was only too willing
To listen. I sat and let it all sink in
But clawed it all out again when your back was turned.

'Who wants to live forever?'
You exclaimed in the snowy Camden roof, nerves strengthened with gin.
'Who wants to fall like dominos?
I don't; I'll be your mother for now

But I'll bleed black over red and red over white,
I will keep flushing them out of me
Into a better host of reverence-
They can stalk me in Hell.'

I can trace you back through every set
Of painted red lips; every dark-haired girl I saw
In Weston Super-Maire made my verbrates
Rattle and judder in a giddy, sickly, hopeful

Motion. Every Cleopatra eye reminds me of you
Every pinup pose, one shoulder slung back
The other rolled forward, a papery orchid
Veil with a tumble of gathered black.

You've left me speechless again; you've let the sun go down on me.
What else is there to see except ch-ch-changes?
Maybe some teeth, 32 angles
Not coated in amber or unfurling secrets of a dragon queen.

Stretching heartstrings, I grew out of you and my empire too
O I heard of you now and again, but I read through dully
Like a tragic headline about somebody else,
Saddened yet distanced; you were caught in that bubble.

Maybe you've learnt now-o no, not at all!
Its broken and grotesque; compelling and fresh. I want it all
I want you this way!
However dirty and hideous

And unmaternal, I am still listening.
It spreads like cancer in the blood, it leads me like a family jewel
Down this road paved by your shaking hand.
'Tonight B, you'll be a younger me.'

'All is love and Soho is a dream.
You'll write about Nature and won't dye your hair
It's a mystery, a missing link, a map but
Isn't that entertainment?'