Lift

(You’re a first glimpse in a brushed steel lift.

You’re black, half-black, part… black. I step towards you.

You wear your hair upswept. Your curls are sculpture, vigorous, ‘African’.

You’re bantering low. There’s a murmur of workmates, a river pool you bathe in,

play in, gently trouble.

I can’t see them. I’ll never know them.

Your eyes are kohled. Your eyes are

grey or blue or green. River eyes, sea eyes.

Kohled – cold?

I’m prose, you’re lyric.

There’s a ghost of smoke about you – ‘giving up again’.

Your scent embroiders the air: delicate little blooms, some fleshly succulents,

mauves, purples, near-blacks; dusk-flowers from a coastal forest –

Botticelli flowers. No, stronger, darker.

(I’m overdubbing trumpets:

Scent to Colour to Music. Musk → Mauve → Music.

Everything is mouths or breathing; inhale, exhale.

And fingers. I have to grasp this gasping glass, this trembling tumbler.

I have to gulp your absent presence down:

delicate, strong, dark. You are beautiful: I sing the word ‘beautiful’, just to myself.

It’s wrong to consume. I consume.

Decades of separation (oblivious): almost is near all in its keen nothing.

I’ve cut myself in the mastering studio. The mixing desk is shorting:

blood is splicing wish with happened, win with lose.

I’m magnifying myself. It’s the alcohol.

Viscous and vitreous fuse. Otis was a singer. Otis is a lift.

I’m not brittle in the drunkard lens, I am your equal.

(I am almost your equal.)

We’re in tropical woodland. Not a metaforest: we’re accidental, we’re eventual but we’re actual.