The Queen of Air and Darkness

The Queen of Air and Darkness

rides a cab through Camden Town,

she smiles into a mobile

as the rain is pouring down.

She gives an address in Mayfair,

the postcode is omitted,

the phone she hides in a handbag,

her lacquered nails be-pitted.

She ghosts past DJ’d security

at the Camolodunum Club:

It’s time for too-sweet cocktails

and fisting without gloves.

The barista is a wizard

-he did some porno once-

he still gets work as an extra

‘better than some other cunts’.

There’ll be some who come down from the city,

snorting with rolled fifty notes,

there’ll be others from estuarine suburbs

thinking of slitting a throat.

The Queen of Air and Darkness

will move to the music of time;

her body a separate notion

to her abstract, absent mind.

The Queen is a solo artiste,

her performances just once a week,

a man once offered a monkey,

if only she’d deign to speak.

She knows that these men have seen her,

from outside and where juices flow,

but their knowledge is but nothing,

and no more than an idiot might know.

With a smile which is much less than blithesome,

she leaves with a moneyed buffoon:

and the Queen of Air and Darkness,

will cut off his balls with a spoon.