Fidelity

Don’t turn around.
You’re warm and you’re soft and you smell like I knew you would
But for God’s sake stay put.
Your skin melts my fingertips as it meets them
Making experience childlike and practice fall away
As I touch with pure instinct.
Have you any idea how musical your breathing sounds?
I remind myself you smoke enough to send a night errant
Stumbling down the ring road at 2 am when you run out
But common sense isn’t going to help here.
I’m way beyond common sense.
Once I met you answering the morning door with a hangover.
You must have felt like the inside of a Hoover bag –
But all I could see was the sunlight sneaking through the curtain behind
you
Leaving you backlit with summer’s breaking gold
And looking like all the most beautiful clichés I’d be
Too embarrassed to repeat.
You were always doing that to me.
The first time I saw you I stood agape
At your smile, your eyes, the life that danced through your slightest
movement.
Of course, the big redhead behind you thought I was looking at her
And that nearly ruined my weekend.
Your tiny shoe left a claymark on my chinos that first I cursed
And then cherished as a souvenir.
I fought this, knowing you and I were someone else’s, telling myself that
You were meant to be my best mate for always
And your nose was too squashed up
And your feet were funny and
Your teeth stuck out and
You had daft metal in holes in your face
And a tattoo on your bum
And anyway my mum would never approve.
All the sweet lies I could to make my passion bearable.
I’ve sat across a café table eating pizza and talking
God knows what into the endless summer evening
And whatever I said I don’t know because all that was echoing in my
head
Was
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful
And more wonderful.
Even though it was only a film quote.
That moment in the Golders Green shaped like a Tardis
When our lips almost touched in the flashing blue glow.
A glimpse, a moment of time that stopped, and hovered and stayed in my
head
And, by making it silly, I could keep it from my heart.
I contented myself with the privilege of knowing
That softly effervescent Ruinart mind
Its passion and excitement, meeting subtle coruscation
With mental caresses of my own;
Blown away by the sight and sound of you holding your audience
spellbound
Swept up in the tingling dance of improvising with you
Making things happen
Thrilled by a better me
Made by a present you.
I know the vulnerability you feel in my heart –
I see it and feel it everyday but now I can rise above it, once it brought
me to my knees but
Now it doesn’t cut my life away from under me
Now I can fight the encroaching hollowness it brings
And keep it under its stone, lurking.
I know you in my blood, my breath, the prickle of the hairs on the back
of my neck
The dark and the light of us both
The unparallelled ecstasy of what could never be real.
Don’t turn around.
If once I see those lips a centimetre away, that face that reorganises me,
If once we kiss - and, oh, such a kiss it would be
Drawn from the base of our spines and the tips of our toes
With St Elmo’s crackling passion upon my lips
Reaching deep and taking you like smoke
Dissolving you into me with a single breath
Unfolding into each other –
Then I’m lost and irredeemable
Forever and there’s no turning back.
No turning back.
No turning.
No.
Don’t turn around.
Let me hold this moment
Hold back this agonizing, burning
Exquisite tear
Feel the imprint of your body on mine
Call it up when I’m alone
A warm memory in a cold bed
A cold body beside me
At the wrong end of a cold country.
Let it be, let it last, let us be one in this embrace for this moment
Let us perhaps love in some way forever
But for God’s precious sake
And our foolish fear that the swirling world will shudder to a halt on its
stuttering axis
Don’t ever turn around.