“You alone my fate this night depends,” words linger from the lips that speak unknown and closed pleasures, sharp firelighters that illuminate pages and pavements beneath the red bridge, two worlds like conjoined twins, each the harbinger of each other’s fate: “You alone my fate this night depends.” And I long for the culprit to appear, to take form and substance within these elegant extracts of the sacred and moral. For like butterflies we must learn to fly, we must flutter by (sic) as do these things behind the sun. Emerge into the light shy of day.

What subtleties we decree to our perceptions of love, the coming and going, the toing and throwing, our home fought battles on bloody whims determine our burning crowns of thistles and redemption. We live inside bruises that thicken with the dull ache of desire to be healed, and I watch the red bridge for the sign of a form standing beneath this Northern sky, this sky loaded with the metaphor of truth. Like a codebreaker I scan quickly for points of entry, and wait.

In this cage we meet and we side step with practiced lies along the invisible parameters of our landscape, I mouth unseen: “On you alone my fate this night depends.” I send out these words as the train shudders to life, its metal frame strains with the weight of anticipation, of journeys towards a new sky.

He said his name was Johnny Rhythm and his sullen hair stank of stale fish and chips but the cheap whisky on his lips couldn’t hide the beauty of his words the greenfly covered his arse when we fucked in the wood and he laughed when I used a silk hanky to wipe them off before he pulled his jeans back on sucking on French cigarettes I painted him as I saw him in the beauty of our youth and there he wrote his songs along the contours of my skin until the cold New York wind choked his voice…Will we meet again? I’ve no idea.

Sharon Jones