the bath cycle I

Skin submerged, heavier than milk. The womb of water’s supplied by two metal taps at the top, dispensing liquid that’s clearer than memory even. The poet, immersed in words all day, finally sinks herself into the liquid substance, reveling in the sheer physicality of it. Not words, but water – though she can’t escape language, even lying here in this languid state. Alliteration at its worst, a rift of rhymes drifts over her with the song-steam from the bath. Kids in the street drinking wine on the sidewalk, saving the plans that we make till it’s night time… it’s cliché but effective, a lyric that tugs along a kite of memories, swaying in the wind like she swayed in that club, the wine-mouths on the pavement, her friends leaving her on the desert streets…too much, too much. She blinks it back, and her eyelids are like the thin skin atop boiled milk, barely a defence against the rising steam of the bath, essence of the past. Her body swirls, she hesitates as she pulls herself pulsating from the womb of memories, the water womb, emerges triumphant from the sour sticky liquid that is Radox bubble bath and soothes herself back into her clothes, to her conscious self. Behind her, the water absorbs the imprint of her body and her dream-state is left to darken and brew in the bath like a warning. A sitting storm.

cigarettes and cinders

We were in a dim-lit club crammed full of twenty-year-olds and cocktails and the slightest scent of sweat. The dancers were too close for comfort, but the loud distorted noise of the bar made it a good place to spill secrets.
Nathalie crossed one leg over the other so that both legs reflected the spangling light of the bar. Her hair was astonishing; it fell across her shoulders and wrapped itself around her frame like amber silk, a robe in itself.
She tipped a tussle of tobacco onto a flattened out cigarette paper, rolled it and rerolled it with concentration, as though it were a piece of origami that she wanted to get exactly right. Soon the cigarette smoke fluttered from her mouth: smoke like a fleet of faded butterflies, emerging from their crumpled lung chrysalis. The smoke dispersed but the tobacco odour lingered and clung to our clothes, the fumes of a dark perfume.

gypsy girl, dancefloor

A gypsy girl, thin in a very beautiful way, came to the table. Her cheekbones glistened with sweat, her skin was luminous. She held a bottle in the hand, a roll-up in the other. Her nose was pierced, one sparkling diamond hovering there uncertainly to signal her rebellion, but without upsetting the exquisite balance of her nostrils. This girl was one of those unique beings who have something about them, a quality that makes you want to watch them and never look away, hold them and never let them go.
She wore plain jeans and a black top which revealed glowing skin, two shoulder blades pulling like wings. Her hair was pinned up at the back of her head with a pencil, as though she were an artist, the strands curling around like swirls of paint. Her eyes shone; she was wholly concentrated on her lover, the dance.

She danced nearer and nearer to him and he danced too, and they were in time to the music the drumbeats the rhythm the lyrics, they moved and they shook and they shimmied closer and closer together, they danced they were dancing closer together and their hip bones were touching closer together
and then
he takes her suddenly, catching her head like a falling star in his hands and pouring burning light into her lips with his an animal kiss, a surprise kiss, playing passion - his trump card - laying his desire on the table.

She tilts her head and kisses back, mouths moving and hands searching,
the music over,
the seduction complete.

Salsa bar, London

Shapes move to a music that sways through the men and women, bouncing the men’s arms and the women’s breasts, flinging feet in an untraceable pattern of steps which, like the trail of kisses across a woman’s body, is led by the men.

This is salsa, only the music is pounding from speakers in a bar in London and the dancers are posers with cowboy hats and bootylicious bodices. This dance is theatre and music combined; the couples entwined enact a courting ritual, a seduction, which the music moves them into, sizzling and swirling around them until the dancer’s identities are sacrificed unto the music, until the dancers are the music ...they move closer into each other’s arms, press up against slick sexy sweaty torsos. Their bodies become curvaceous shimmering shadows in the strange strobe lighting. The music climbs higher; the dancers sway and shimmy more and more...

Men ask us to dance, by way of a possessive hand around our waists and a powerful tug that sends our hearts thudding and our salsa steps landing in a flurry of footprints across the dance floor. Later, sitting in a booth drinking tap water, we get given two raspberry vodka concoctions with three ripe raspberries strung on a cocktail stick across the glass – a strangely rich symbol of desire.