Tombliboo Tumbling

Yet another...

Reckless in the dim and tangled pretty in your skin, we are haunting the margins of myth; we are courting the favour of time as she dances; we are memorising eyes. And passionfruit bruises like rubies will hang from your neck, and your cavalier curls will obscure where stars into vague constellations were plucked, and by morning your bones will be laced with the traces of mine.

It is ribs of pink that interrupt my thinking, Didcot power station, twinkling red from the ridge, and ink-blotted rivers of pipistrelles flitting above; the slumber of history still fitful, the morbid curlew calling. It's conflating you with Irish rhymes and moons tucked under hillsides, blooming purple, silken blue; it's this room that is there in my heart that is hungry with freedom still clumsy and new, as I cycle from parsley and partridges strutting to ardour, from dream to harlequin dream.

It terminates at Stanmore; oh, for more of your dark hair and den-warm eyes; you sprang from legend, but you stalked along the Thames - and so my evening ends. Though I'm learning, I have earned a kind of atavistic pain, and I felt I should have caught the train to Stratford.

I brought you to a place that clings, unbeknownst to those who pass it, to its past; I brought you somewhere familiar to know that I wasn't undone, to let the ghosts of cats and dogs and guardians of literature - Barrie, Woolf, and Lehmann - somehow cradle me as you did. For I wanted to add a veneer of our own to a place already teeming, for a thing so desperately good that it couldn't be thought of not to perish, but to fall into place with the night, so greedy she clamoured for love, so shrewd that she only craved love just discovered, just hungrily begun.