(for the bright bustling busy blowy streets)

and we kissed beneath a spotlight, glitter and grotesque faces smiling on, asking for the time or if any'd ever passed. fresh faces and tired drinks, and you had yellow hair - and two eyes shining like the truth - yeah you looked just like a poster for the hitler youth. you were so honest we got sick out in the street (i'd said "before they throw us out, darlin' let's leave")

we hid from police cars behind the swimming baths (where my brother got stopped, and got six months) - the blue lights tried to make you bright, and it was then that i regretted the last few nights. it was the spring, girl from philosophy, who told me i was perfect, fed me drugs and lay around. no food or central heating but no matter, her fingers made me feel better. then she went to die in a hospital bed; we traded gifts before she left ("white light/white heat" for one lock of her hair, i told her here's my poetry and she said "this is mine - my lyric fair." and i didn't laugh at what she said, nor she at me (she must've been heavily drugged). but that was in the past when i found you, beckoning to me from a dancefloor, drunk, or maybe i was waving too, you were a window to see through, you're mucky now but you've made me more transparent than i've yet been, you've seen it out so well but why say anything else my only love.

but tell me something true or is that too tricky for tell me something true or is that too tricky for you.

i'd guide you down the streets i don't walk in company, i would guide then disappear so you get lost in the turns and can't get home, well i like to be alone when somebody wants me. i could tell you all about falling. it's wanting what you can't have and then getting it. it's hurting worse than ice and then forgetting it. but oh, don't listen to me my time has past, just another book to put back on the shelf at the last. just another branch on the family tree, full of tales of the girl who loved me (we were to be wed but the pastor never came - but then neither did i; i couldn't play the game. and still, it would've been a sin - the papers for my third wife were weeks late coming in. we should have waited). she ran away from me and left me wandering and lost in my crippled mind, no there's nothing much to recommend old age. or hanging round to become an old maid.

and now it's time for someone new, it's time for something new to do, it's time for you to find a new vocation, you never told me about your previous occupation - you don't want to.

well i'd like to walk around your mind now i've revisited my streets, and match up every signpost to your similar retreats. i'm not sabina's franz beneath an ugly hat. i wasn't born to live like that. my lineage demands of me a lesser strife - does your history demand you live a better life? or your hosiery demand you be a better wife?

while sinking through the sheets you wash i'll recall us stumbling through the dark, and reaching for your hand in the cold, falling into foreign bodies, beds with unmade stories rolling out like summer hills. will i ever get to show you where i grew up, will we ever turn ourselves into the mystic promised butterflies... this is stupid, these are words i just like using. and it ain't me babe, this is your head playing tricks on you, dancing round and laughing like the kids who used to steal your skipping rope - did they do that? they did it to me.