Bloodshot Monochrome. Patience Agbabi

sightseers. Big Ben’s quarter chime

      strikes the convoy of number 12 buses

      that bleeds into the city’s monochrome.

      Through somebody’s zoom lens, me shouting

      to you, Hello! . . . on . . . bridge . . . ’minster! The aerial view postcard, the man writing squat words like black cabs in rush hour.

      The South Bank buzzes with a rising treble.

      You kiss my cheek, formal as a blind date.

      We enter Cupid’s capsule, a thought bubble

      where I think, ‘Space age!’, you think, ‘She was late.’

      Big Ben strikes six. My SKIN .Beat™ blinks, replies

      18·02. We’re moving anticlockwise.

ON TURNING ON THE TV TO CATCH,BY CHANCE, SOME QUAVERING BARSOF ‘SUMMERTIME’, THAT VOICE, PITCH,BLACK AS A SEMIBREVE, SCARSON THE FACE FILLING THE BLANK SCREEN,THE BLURRED BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGEOF JANIS JOPLIN’S SYNAESTHETIC SCREAM,ALL HIPPY HAIR AND CLASS A VINTAGE;MY REACTION MIRRORING MAMA CASSAT MONTEREY WATCHING ‘BALL AND CHAIN’CLIMB TO A CLIMAX; THE HEAVY BASS,THEN JANIS TAKING IT DEEP DOWN DOWN –TO THE BLUES, THE DEEP SOUTH, THE NEXT FIXOF ROCK ’N’ ROLL AND HEROIN AND SEX.

       Wow!

COMEDOWN

      The mind is its own place, and in itselfCan make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. Milton, Paradise Lost

      It wasn’t the rent boy we met in Heaven

      who looked fifteen and called us dollies,

      with his social worker as an accessory

      I thought was his boyfriend, leading us up

      to the party full of lacklustre women

      in tight polyester, and upstairs, not

      the Skin with the spider’s web tattoo

      for a face, that bled red light in my skull;

      nor the ugly man who said Full of fuckingspades and half-castes as soon as we entered whom I misheard, the social worker doing his damnedest to sugar the pill: it was taking a drug that made us innocent enough to leave Heaven and end up in Hell.

FOREIGN EXCHANGE

      In Hamburg, me and Anna, who is German,

      and a man across the street attacks us, spitting

      his violence; the air is cold, and bitter

      faces gather like rainclouds, like an omen

      and my gentle friend counter-attacks but later

      refuses to translate and that’s the killer,

      her silence, like a shroud; I feel the colour

      rage in my cheeks for lack of that translation

      reminding me of school, that French exchange,

      a simple sentence, Parce qu’elle est noire, delivered at such speed and with such hatred it stung me: to encounter so much rage; more, for being judged solely by colour; but most, the fact it had to be translated.

NORTH(WEST)ERN

      I was twelve, as in the twelve-bar blues, sick

      for the Southeast, marooned on the North Wales coast.

      A crotchet, my tongue craving the music

      of Welsh, Scouse or Manc. Entering the outpost

      of Colwyn Bay pier, midsummer, noon,

      nightclub for those of us with the deep ache

      of adolescence, when I heard that tune,

      named it in one. Soul. My heart was break

      dancing on the road to Wigan Casino,

      Northern Soul Mecca where transatlantic bass

      beat blacker than blue in glittering mono.

      Then back, via Southport, Rhyl, to the time, place,

      I bit the Big Apple. Black, impatient, young.

      A string of pips exploding on my tongue.

SOL

      After I huffed, puffed, pushed you into the pool

      of light and blood on the crushed white sheet

      you screamed like an abattoir, like shit,

      breaking the day to smithereens until

      they swaddled you, our son, our Sol:

      you were light, light-skinned, skinny, sugar-sweet,

      hair iridescent with blood, eyes bloodshot

      but they said they would heal

      and they did. Home, we keep you in the shade

      in a basket bed where we watch you grow

      golden, golden brown, your eyes indigo

      to bronze, stare and stare at the ladybird

      with a rattle for a heart. All you know