In a sand casino we devour the sun
standing like two dimensional cut outs
spinning roulette under a three hundred degree rainbow.

I leave friends orbiting the night.
Neon lights with cues
push me into traffic's deafening rune
where subways converge.
Now, I slam against a naked human pyramid
balancing so high
I think it might spill
as simply as my last martini.

I meet a corpse in a dinner suit
he feels for my pulse under folds
of this green shantung frock.
It's a place you can't film.
His hands tap the fandango.
Spindly branches tangling my high fidelity.

The corpse in his crumpled dinner suit
corners Los Galapagos Boulevard
calmly stepping to a conga line's limbo.
I'm bent in tai chi's harmonising languor:
lost in dead spaces
between my minds fix
and a nicotine rush.
Some faces flick past
pages from a book I've never read.

He thinks I am like him:
he checks my vital signs:
says we're facing the wrong way.
His double breast shields me
from a city's metallic rage.

Later, at the sand casino
I order grilled parrot
from a waiter who juggles watermelons.
The corpse isn't hungry
he's shredding clouds
pleating napkins into geodesic domes.

Hooded boys frisk
the sidewalk,
somersault gutters
or stand around swinging bats.

The paper seller
at Angel
listens to “Do the Locomotion”.

Tourists hog footpaths,
stray across Queensway.

They feel safe in less hurried postcodes.

Windows here
won't open.

Praed Street Shops
sell Union Jack jock straps.

Girls want to look like Kate Moss.
Saplings as mannequins.

Wreaths pile up outside
Edgeware Road tube.

In London, tequila is the new vodka,
and vodka is the new tequila.

Some churches only open to tourists.
I want to take up religion.