slip your hands down my shoulders, and memorize the pattern of markings. press your soul in fingerprint markings down my calves, make me feel as if i take up space. i need to be reminded of my existence or it might fall away all together. spell your name onto my collarbone in swirling font and count the cubic inches i exhale.

take the mid night hours and spread them apart, find more time in-between and use it to write your animation onto a sheet of paper. drop your words into my mouth, feed me like a starving cub, my palate is dry without your recited weeping.

wind telephone wires around my hands, dig them into my wrists and leave indents not unlike sleep marks. those leave though. contour yourself around the bridge of my nose and seep carefully into my pores, it's refreshing. glide through my hollow middle and decorate my entity with your pretty, pretty being.

She is as lines to Bauhaus, oblique
In category yet commanding in form;
Her mind a pool of wealth and Grace,
Allusions to illusions, omega to
Alpha’s strongest gaze. I stand
Failed, distraught, lacking the
Dexterity of voice to call her name,
The temerity of will to regain her fair
Charms and affirmed charisma.
Lost I am within a cascade of
Superlatives and tribulation.
Were only she to have conquered
My mind, I would be of sound spirit to
Elicit some tempered comprehension;
Yet alas, I have been taken in soul
And I can do naught but wait
To see if she will one day return.

Sitting a corner booth by herself,
sipping on a Long Island Iced Tea
and reading Keats.
Hands down, she's the most
captivating person in this bar.

Fingertips calloused, and hands nicked and scraped
like she'd been in a fight with experience
and went down swinging.
Eased into her seat like slipping naked into a hot bath.
Smiled with all her teeth
like no one was looking.

Left her phone at home,
in pieces on the kitchen floor.
Tonight was the night she was going to forget all about the custody battle
the bill collectors
the late night fights about who was right
and who was left in the room with all this shattered glass to clean  up
the long sobbing nights with her pillow and her secret shame
the regret for time poorly spent looking for love in bars and cold blue eyes
the years that separated her from twenty-two –  when she was young and delusionally happy.

With her body language, she unknowingly spoke to me:
Tonight, I came to drink and dance.
Don't bother me with pick up lines.
Pick up artists, go find another canvas.
Mine's been painted over plenty.
I don't have the time to save anymore white knights from their mother's ***.
That fairytale story always ends in Shakespearean tragedy.
Plus, the **** horse leaves scuff marks on the dance floor.

I take one last sip
and slip the bartender an extra twenty-
tonight the nightingale drinks for free.

I leave before she can thank me.

(For my old mate Kevin Blackburn)

Bentonite is magic
When mixed in slurry form,
And injected into apertures
Where earth worms are the norm.
The slurry forms a barrier
Which holds the concrete, wet,
Quite apart from earthen surfaces
To give exactly what you get.

YOU GET NO CONTAMINATION
YOU GET CONCRETE DRYING CLEAN
YOU GET SMOOTH GREYISH SURFACES
WHICH COULD BE PARCELED TO THE QUEEN!

So when constructing tunnels
Or massive footings bare
Or reinforced deep piling
Which extends way down to there,
You MUST pour in the Bentonite
In slippery, slurry form
To keep the concrete looking
Sparkling clean, as is the norm.

Then....
YOU GET NO CONTAMINATION
YOU GET CONCRETE NICE AND CLEAN
YOU GET BEAUTIFUL GREY SURFACES
SHINING BRIGHTLY FOR THE QUEEN!

Marshalg
Lurking near the Bentonite tanks
Victoria Park Tunnel
15 June 2011

Hidden.