Morrissey - Parallax

Late February sunlight, winters filigree still inside it. Beside me the bins are casting vast apparitions of themselves over the yellow line while my head has lain itself down across the tracks, the way it wanted to all those years ago, in Amsterdam, near the Leidesplein, before the see-through boy with his quiver of arrows could claim me as his own. It jolts bolt upright as the Carrickfergus train vanishes in the opposite direction. I could be a dissident in a textbook in Soviet Russia discovered after the print run and painstakingly blackened out by each teacher, or a stage set after the lights have blown on a tinkly Victorian performance in reds and golds. I could be blood in a black-and-white video. The platform is shining with salt.

My shadow displaced at the waist is taking a bow. Lady other, Lady mine, if I stood here all morning Id watch you retracting back like drowning soap. Shadows of candles on church walls at Evensong manifest not as flame, but smoke.

The top notes were the husks: fractious but nervous, giddy, little-voiced, while underneath a strong strange melody pulsed as though the grain was rigging, or a forest. In all my praise and plainsong I wrote down the sound of a mans boots from behind the mountain.

But for this commission from the Corporation hes sending home dispatches from Sebastopol Street in which a man by the railings ghosts himself by turning his head too soon. One cannot tell if the room in the photograph entitled Number 36 is inhabited light from the missing upper storey is shafted by jutting planks, the fire-black walls are crystalline and yet outside similar terraces with crumbling masonry and dark for doors, in bedraggled unspeakable arcs hes conjured with his shillings, each child strong enough to manage it carries a child.

And you were the white dot of the television, vanishing vanishingjust before the screen goes dark.