Time = Cause . Listen and Read.

Sit still, calm your heart. Imagine: imagine night time. Imagine inky blackness speckled with stars. Imagine a road. Also night air, light and transparent. Imagine rolling along this empty road, unnaturally cold in a place which is never cold. Look up at the sky, forgetting the rest of the world exists to look at the giant suns so far away as to be sequins. See those whole worlds that are not your world hanging suspended in nothing, while you feel the air turning colder as you roll faster.

i feel the chill. if i let my hands go now, will i fall faster?

Once upon a time i was in love. I wouldn't say she loved me back but we got by, after a fashion. (she couldn't love me back, there were too many others). But I loved her all out of measure. She was horrid, but beautiful. She was many things to many people, but she was all things to me, very nearly. In her I sought refuge, I sought understanding, I sought pockets of myself I hardly knew existed. Every day was something new and undiscovered. Every day in a place I might have passed a hundred times I found a whole new facet or country. In the haze of sleep or fever of eager gazing at her, I smelled the promise of a hundred million more surprises.

But as always time runs on, and passes by as thoughtlessly as I do the unflickering streetlight near the bus stop. On graduation day there was rain, and I was uncharacteristically equipped with an umbrella. I knew it before I felt it. Good bye was not even a word or thought or handshake. My souvenirs were all stolen.

I used to daydream of a london at war with itself. I imagined a man so overwhelmed with what he saw everyday that when he came home he sank himself in a painstakingly kettle heated bath to forget and aid his metamorphosis into something human. In what passed for life he was not human, he had to change to become so.

So perhaps my dream is real. Sickening disaster addicts that we were, perhaps we would have longed for the chance to prove our resilience, would have ran down the street to help (it was down my street, it was near my house, it was where i did my mundane grocery shopping). Or who am I kidding, we are all different now, I am nothing like I was when I loved her. I am stuck wondering where you all are now: where are you astronaut, where are you geographer - i never got to say i was sorry, i never got to tell you that you were right, that i miss you - where are you solicitor, programmer, dopesmoker, scientist? Crewmen? I never got to tell you that I envied you your girlfriend, lusted after your sister, that you saved my life, that you gave me a home. Are you lying in a makeshift bed somewhere bleeding, tended to by a younger version of me? Are you wandering aimlessly about, unable to remember your own name or where you live? Is your charred body entwined with twisted metal in the dark of the tunnels which yesterday were your lifeline but today your grave? Tonight I put my hand to my mouth in thought or exclamation, and I smell the smell of those old days, still stale and surprisingly unchanged.

And yet though I want to feel sorry for you as well as them I can't. Our affair is over but I paid attention to what you did since then. You called this upon yourself, you asked for all this to happen. You sent those boys and girls and sons and daughters to die in the desert, and now they will die at home too.

london is a desert where friends lie dying and others lie about dying. I'll hold you close like a sack of explosives with a sizzling fuse.