London/Pt.3

Resolve is temporary immersion into a place that displays loneliness on the front porch, am I hiding or haunting? The cemetery of the morning is overgrown, overcrowded, and under adored by the running clubs speeding through Brompton to avoid death while I stand in archways holding my breath in a sunlit spell --gold at every angle, watching my shadows steel against a light that only loves it in opposition. Most graves are ageless, something obscured, one hundred and eighty-five years of rain and too many footprints for the earth to remember the perpetual pressing of leaves into mud. All dead things left to hide under ivy while the city sprouts around it, plotting against the plots in defamation, stones left nameless, visionary carvings with pigeon adornments and the prosperity of future urban explorers.

The London Underground is a dystopian invocation, too deep for anything but bad dreams and claustrophobic breath where everyone is sneaking a finite amount of oxygen in unacknowledged competition, people are not meant for this proximity. The Borough Market is an open-air synonym on a Saturday morning and everyone in this city is a foodie on the weekend.

Despite the crowds I feel further isolated, no one to share the experience and commentary I was destined for. I am a collection of 10-second stories on the internet and narrative texts to someone gracefully infiltrating my insides as if I was unaware of the connection and it's panic inducing fallout.

Hundreds of hungry people are herding one another several feet behind me, but only a handful in my immediate vision; I wonder if they would love me the way I love them, briefly--intense eye contact and ecstasy followed by one hundred immediate hours of longing. Snared by the life I envisioned for us in the heart of a heartbeat and the spell of nostalgia accidentally summoned from my mouth in the bottom of my stomach.