Stoke Newington High Street. Its brook flows in fits and starts, carrying broken lives and mumbling driftwood down and slow and round about. Covered in the thin slick of city life, where rainbows dance on the surface of puddles and feathers shine with ornamental grime.
This coffee is too black, too cold, too long forgotten to be anything but a false anchor, a precarious tether to the bank. I only want the flow. The gentle detritus marks the tide of evening as it folds and snags, teasing, receding, from my kerbside shore. It draws me in with bubbling, flotsam songs.
Stoke Newington High Street. Cluttered with life and shouts and joyous hustlers filling their allotted span with bustle and vanity and bright, cheering words. Anything but leave it empty, a hole in which thick waters will consume their remembering.
There’s only one way to truly experience this hot, carnal artery and that is naked. Free from the colic and bravura of our world. Where I am I, and you might be anyone. Casting off that crush of baked on toxins,
so I, maskless, am no longer I,
and we can swim and
will be washed and
the traffic shall bark in delight
at nudists running down the centre line.