The City Lives Under My Skin
Which city, all city, inside, inside it itches and moves me makes me manic it matches the anxiety inside, outside it matches it matches
The sky is dark blue and i'm waiting for 87 The taxi stops with its big bright tangerine lights tambourine-ing saying look at me Im bound for somewhere I clear my throat I've had three really strong mojitos at the bar on the border of Essex street made me think of east village in NYC I watched Klarna taxis and yellow green ambulances clear the street where Waterloo buses were meant to stop I saw blue men with their emotions tied to their necks like necklaces glided in gold but it was meant to be a secret and McDonald’s packaging discarded on the street an effigy of brilliance Lonely echos filled the spaces between shattered out phone booths and that pub on the corner that fills itself with teapots and minced mint Mojitos more mint water than rum I called my man to try and make sense of the structure The lines on the street were hieroglyphics dragging on in red and green colors He knew the code of
everything
and I tried endlessly to pick at the pieces form a whole sentence from the broken bits These pieces make a drowned out picture but i'm drawn to it That horizon like a big blue nothing as if following it would make anything make sense As if it was made of some rare kind of brujería The worms in my belly that live by the century stick their tongues out They poke at the gossip This lull feels replete A pregnant basin full of water nothing feels as blue as i do now The world is a mashup of faces The collection of a collaborative concept that is strewn across sea and land like some folk story told to those that don't get it Someday we’ll all be forgotten anyways I blink trying to add the in between spaces moonlight mathematics I know i'm nothing in all of this The sky blinks too bruised blueberry eyelids to try and mitigate and im reminded im just another lonely specimen I tell someone behind me to fuck off with my mountain top shoulders as if the sentence could structure the being Im dragging on like a long hand made long form prose poem boxed at the bottom of someone’s closet Cigarettes cocked brilliantly but no one actually wants me It’s a hosted charity The man at Tottenham Court Road plays the rain man song the one they sing in five bars with the drawling line on the guitar he’s quite good but I don’t tell him that Scurry along I am drunk and the alcohol in my bladder is oppressive I dive between corners as if that would fix things only to wait we others all waiting for the color to show Big red streak burst bright into a cluster I have to piss and I probably will on the corner of that gas station where the grass grows tall and no one can see me bend down on the street to try and make it go away The evening stings just as much Seamstress with her fine point needle and thread Sunlight reminds me I should be home and home is where he is and somehow i’m drunk but he isn’t Its incredible And expect the unexpected but it never comes He’s not like the others The sun still shines the next morning The women on the train have embroidered flowers on their shoulders as if to puff up but somehow their sounds sink deeper inside to communicate that lull All of us trying to formulate an equation As if the blue of the sky was a cipher Waiting in their tombs of blue black blue blue blue So goddamn blue waiting for someone to know them The
train screeches on trying to tell me something but I don’t know her enough it’s just screaming to me
Tell me what she tells you
I try to write out a Rosetta Stone of screeching A key as if that would help me But im just as lost I don’t know where to go from here The blue The screech The crow that perches and preaches as of giving a sermon would give anything A life worth living for it to make sense I stretch to find the sky diluted by dollars Pounds in this gloom glycol country The weight of it carried on our shoulders The ring ding ding of money-man’s converts trying to tell each other of the blue-man’s hill That lull created by others Where arch is charged for by two The sky is blue and so am I
No man’s land is lonely.
Formerly known as ‘blue’. I wrote this piece over the summer of 2023 when I started reading at and joined Gobjaw. I was getting to know London, was still new to it, unsure of it and my place within its wiggling swarm. I’ve since grown massively and learned so much about myself, about the people around me and this city. It lives inside me. This poem unknowingly acted as the catalyst for my current obsession — A project that I’ve been researching, documenting, embodying for a while now (and perhaps for a while longer still).