Love album
Hearing ‘She Sells
Sanctuary’ and being transported back in time
To my 19-year-old self, impossibly optimistic, spinning in a
darkened room
As the guttural guitars reverberate through my chest, ripple
the length of my arms and burst
From my extended fingers.
The ache this gives me now.
I can feel the greying carpet under my bare feet, and see
the glint of brown beer bottles under a coffee table, and feel the worn canvas
jacket folded in my hands as I pick through sleeping bodies
To the garden, for a breather, outside the fug of last night’s
party
To collect my thoughts, still my pulse, spread my fingers
over my sternum where I could feel my heart’s jagged beat
I’d made eye contact at 7.58pm and it had started then, this
dimorphic sensation
Like asthma when stoned
Like trying to breathe underwater
Like heartburn after the warmth of golden whisky
The pinprick feeling on your skin when you are too acutely
aware of someone’s close proximity
And need to move away before you kiss them or stab them under
an eye with your keys
The ache this gives me now.
Because I can see the room all too clearly
And all the years outside that house are a fog-haze of
distance, time, space, activity, movement,
None of which alters one iota that essential feeling that
burnt its way through me, at the reverb echoing from the speaker, the
fingerpicking opening, and the held breath before the drum and bass filled the
space in me
A void waiting for any love
Any tribal connection, any hand to grab mine from out of the
spinning, and still me
The ache this gives me now.
