I am Like This (A Consumer on Holiday in 21st Century London)

I can feel all my wiring loosened. I am capable of doing anything, so long as it doesn’t require discipline or persistence. Of making any thought. Of winding in circles ‘round the same outdoor market for hours, thinking the same questions: “Do they take credit cards? What about traveler's cheques? Who uses traveler's cheques?”

I start engaging all the bums, including a pirate who says the role of tyrant is my inheritance to shirk. That I can shirk it by paying for his beer. He says I don’t listen. It would have been easier to just give him my change. But I wanted to be ready for the tamale man, forgetting this isn’t Chicago. I guess that’s privilege at its highest: Being always ready for the tamale man. 

I start a fight with a curly-headed Argentine hipster. He said don’t talk to my girlfriend. I let her make her own decision. It’s the pirate's fault (did he not seed this oppositional mood?) The bouncers won’t let me back in but at least I’ve still got my nose set proper true like

My heart rattles in my chest so that I’m afraid to drink my coffee.

Immobilized by simple choices. Should I go to the British Museum or is the weather too nice?

Ready to start muttering to myself.

Pleased with the sweet-gin smell of my stool.

Happy birthday to everyone who has a birthday this year! You guys are really getting old!

Seeing “Fire Exit, Keep Clear” sign and reading it as “Free Wifi”

My soulmate probably died thousands of years before I was born. I’ll drink to that. Cheers!

Only through fame can one enter the fantasies of and fuck every girl in the world in their dreams. I should have been in a boy band. Then I could have shaken my transcendental ass in Serbian and Chinese and Scandinavian fantasies, and still eaten grass in the park outside parliament.

My mind unlike a river, but rather like rain falling into fine sand so that each thought slithers into crowded, irretrievable darkness before it can be fully resolved.

Short-shorts, piped mid-high socks, indoor soccer shoes and a ponytail. Parading her legs down every street twice. Faux déjà vu. Trying to walk her way into all our dreams. Or maybe she just forgot her shin-guards. That was a completed thought! I’m clawing my way out!

Thinking of kids. Their honesty. Their sobriety. I should paint hypothetical playgrounds. I should be a playground architect. None of that warped plastic bullshit back home, nor this Kafkaesque fuckery they make in Sweden, steel slides snaking out of giant steel ears. Good old-fashioned monkey bars and wood chips. Sandboxes and slides. I’d better not reinvent the wheel.

Okay, I gotta try to write a poem. It’s an obligation, I’m in London. Put it to some Beatles chords. Here I go:

Making an intelligent conclusion

When I’m like this

Is like trying to swim in rain

If you try to fight a trust-fund gaucho in Shoreditch

You can expect to be swept off

With soles pawing for the floor

When I’m like this

I understand the truest villains see a hero in the mirror

And so maybe if I had just a little more courage

I could do terrible things

Although an obstacle in my villainous pursuits

Is my empathy throbs for pain, perhaps, more readily than for pleasure

But I can truthfully claim

A Pict on a bridge in London blasting a war song out his bagpipes

The beautiful smile of a Ghanaian leatherworker, showing me his wares 

Or even an old woman in Denmark shuffling over cobbles with a cup of strawberries, Godmorgen!

Could make me cry

Equally

A city full of pommy birds in tight jeans

In shorts that half-cover asses like fuck-drunk eyelids

Shoulders out shining and eyes bright, shining

Can make me go insane

In two-and-a-half days

And so I’m like this

A planchette moving over a Ouija board into oncoming traffic

Sorry, sure, look right then left

Pardon, pardon

Sitting like a dandelion in the Victoria Embankment Gardens

Belly full of cider

An oversaturated dandelion oozing yellow oil

Another cider please

Scaring the children, Pardon

I thought this was what you’re supposed to do in London!

Accusing myself before the sight of every tablet, ornamentally carved walnut shell and death mask in the British Museum

What have you done?

And ring around the gift shop and out back again into the heat and humidity

The pirate should have been the harbinger, but forgotten again

For the march of glorious legs that make me chew and swallow my tongue

Make me desire to divide myself

Every perfect stone of the Westminster Abbey accusing me like the Walnut Shells

And so humbly, shamefully

Driving my bike again into traffic, pitiful as the possum

Pardon!

And emerging again with my brain twisting

And my heart a deaf bat in a small cage

I am like this

Crying at Big Ben

At the Mesopotamian Tablets and the echoing chuckles of the men who translated them

At the electric cars

I am like them! 

(oh god, oh no, like them)

Like the others who still orbit the outdoor market!

Wondering Where shall I set my arse?

And Do they take cards?

And Fried Scotch eggs or coconut pancakes poured from a Siamese teapot?