Trust me, I was in Basingstoke.
“I am half agony, half hope.”

The forest had acoustics like a lightening house.
Something tiger-bright moved within the light.
What was stolen left a darkness behind it.

Fire, the slave of passion, lounged
like a salamander on a chaise longue, while
logic dismantled in the night.

Hot sauce.

I knew my own happiness.

Duplicate vultures,
an absence calculated in bones,
flapped down the M3.

Winchester in sight; the ruin of Basingrad’s
roundabouts held in the dead mirror.

“I was in the middle
before I knew that I had begun.”

A regulated hater.

Ahead: Aunt Jane and that bloke under the hill.
No map for this country.

And I’m rolling through, King of the B3046.
The van in a ditch; I’m throwing a sword
into the unquiet water.

Feed me banana gas,
that yellow miracle –
those Ciénaga filling stations
shut back in 1928.
I can still smell the fumes.

A lone lamp post,
rust-yellow in the dark.

Behind it,
a whitewashed wall,
grey shuttered windows –
silent to its solo oversight
over two mice waltzing.

The road seems deserted
save for a splashing cab.
Retail sheds glow
rainbows hugging
the night workers.

Before me,
the kebab shop: red
peeling frame, striplight white,
grey meat spinning inside –
Nirvana at 1 a.m.

I spy a banana pump
stuck under a neon halo.

I send a man to steal it;
the mice say “No.”