MATTHEW CALEY
Lines Written Upon A Prophylactic Found In A Brixton Gutter
O useless balloon, supine, not the colour of dolor but see-thru, salmon-pink, plugged with your load of ore draped in a grating side by side with imploded pizza-stars and half a crepe.
Squished jellfish of desire, trodden under the fly-boy trainers of crack-dealers by the Taxi-rank and noodle-bar —witness to a union of souls or alleyway tremble— spermicidal eel, you know the perfidious trade-routes,
how the underground waters of the Effra destabilise our feet, how pomegranate or melon-seeds from the glass-arcades stuck in the tread of our boots
might spring up a rash of fruit trees in the inner city sometime and knowing also how joy is brief and rarely sanctioned by the Pontiff you dangle-drop, precariously, swim out for the open sea.