Singer songwriter and fellow mutantspace member Francesca Baines sent this poem into me the other day so here it is for your pleasure:
Before My Heart Is A Crowded Street
My heart has not the politeness of pedestrian crossings.
Footfall and tyre grind chime together
With a thumped horn when they almost collide.
Steaming trucks, the bicycle couriers’ boxes
Are pedalling their criss-cross through lanes of bright traffic.
I will always break the lights ‘though amber flames are plenty,
‘Cause you and I like to walk in hand when alleyways are empty.
To the hush of paper bags and drain pipes dripping
We follow slipping rooftops to find each other’s lips. Kissing:
We call a star filled night to contend the city’s rights to the sky.
We call between the cracks for the scaffolds to crumble.
We call along the rust to coax the fire-escapes come fall away
In the dust, kick the bucket, do not retire beside the motorway.
Forget the tower blocks stooping on steel in their subsidence.
Do not relent to this buzz as the best version of silence.
I will always break the lights ‘though amber flames are plenty,
‘Cause you and I like to walk in hand when alleyways are empty.
Where park benches are drenched in dew and you are painted in my morning,
Before the day’s first train of thought departs, wheels yawning:
We are anti-architects before the sun’s first light
Touches brick and mortar, the blank civic disorder.
Before my heart is a crowded street.
Before my heart is a pavement beat we like to walk.
Before my heart. You are
Before my heart in the four story shadow,
The windows that blink,
The bird shit that dries on the hot slate, the plate clink
Of early diners.
We are hushed the night is quiet
Before my heart. Empty handed we like to walk,
Into the empty
Dark.