|
|
|
|
Return to Jeremy Reed's page
Extracts from Jeremy Reed's West End Survival Kit
|
Seti Guy He’s moon infected
from lunar samples
extraterrestrial pathogens
they could be Martian?
microbes from underground aquifers
or unquarantined rocks.
He’s relocated to St. James
(shirty Jermyn Street)
his blueberry-coloured Cadillac
exchanged for brogues
and DB bespoke.
It’s the Nirvana box set
does helium to his cells
a demo ‘Teen Spirit’
like riot in his nerves.
The metabolising smudge
on someone else’s world
got into his bloodstream
rogue bacteria in his veins
like alien info.
The Harley Clinic’s a respite _
Seti pays for rehab.
The inert lump he’s got
is unmoveable as London’s
unquantifiable grey slab.
Sometimes he gets data
from a Nasa Lab
reads it in a random
clockwise circuit of the city
harnessed in a space-cruiser cab.
Bad days it’s anti-clockwise
the pills bring him down:
getting out at Buckingham Palace
armed with pots of purple spray-paint
and a child’s quizzical frown.
< < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < - > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Altered Geography He shows me a silver foil ownership: do rehab in no atmosphere?
He wants to be a black masseur
at the Lunar Hilton’s facilities,
tells me his dream on Shaw Street, window up
on the King’s Road toxicity,
a shy, window-boxed, deep red cyclamen,
fleshy as ear lobes, holding on
through nurture to the urban scene,
the claret spearhead flowers tutelary
to somehow thinking green…
We shift topography closer –
Henry Beck’s doodle – the tube map
plotted in 1933 –
lines vertical, horizontal,
or 45 degrees,
the river the only surface feature,
width of a blue bra strap and kinked
like a tagliatelle strand,
the diagram remapping space
London as psychogeography-
Watford moved in like a chess piece,
the suburbs suddenly players.
Our city? But we’re lost in it,
above, below, endless repeat:
no way out of its corridors
replicating our arteries?
We take appearances on trust,
your moon plot in its foil wrapper,
there in your wallet : the King’s Road
rumbling like thunder in our blood.
< < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < < - > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > Rogue Pilot His unreconstructed Mini Cooper –
the brushwork still articulate
in body fillers, aerospace
silver, a 1960s artefact
he guns to meetings with his cult
of rogue pilots trained virtually,
sits like it’s on a Heathrow parking stand
awaiting climb-out.
His T-shirt documents Kurt
Cobain
as eponymous rock criminal
blasting a tunnel through his head
to get out.
They talk about corrosive resistance
of composites fused together
in a polymer matrix.
Degradation’s their theme. Sometimes the haze
over the airport’s
like distance,
a corridor of cooling air
the cold increase rising with altitude.
They meet in hotel atriums,
do theory like lift off, plane spot
for a black Boeing with black fins –
the one designated
‘Endgame,’ in low flying cloud.
They ritualize the burning pilot,
liquidate the torched doll in aviation fuel,
and watch it incinerate, red
and blue and loud.
The nuclear winter’s in close.
They sight its whiteout from a multiplex,
uniformed now, prepared to fly
a decommissioned fighter jet
out of the sun over Docklands
in a final salute.
|
||
Return to Jeremy Reed's page
