Walking through streets yellowed by catseye lights and rain, thinking of you and what would come next. I was thin then.

My bones poked through threadbare gabardine bought second hand but coming from good sources: Aquascutum, through how many pairs of hands, much like you. Much like me, my bones poking into you, your world and dreams.

I was not sick of love then, not like now and knowing the maintenance of it. I was on my way to fuck you again, but the truth of it was my doing this for now rather than for later, love or whatever future our fucking might bring.

I was insensitive enough then not to think of how you might be, what you might be doing. Whether you were bathing, cleaning, preparing your cunt for me, for us. These things you hid from me, much like others did. Though once I watched Jane as she sucked water in and out of her cunt and wanting to fuck her again whilst she did. Turned on because she could. Wanting that energy, movement.

Insensitive to your dreams of us and what we might become.

Youth  and sights of other thighs had turned me away. You were nice enough, just bright enough but held no challenge, no mystery of self evolving, no future promise that what we were was a beginning.

So why, how come I think of you know, here 15 years later, hundreds of miles and forever away from those streets I sauntered on my way to you. Perhaps masochism that regret is, the gentle controlled lash of pain that could be but is power play enough to hint of more but not to scar.

Though I fancy boredom covers it instead, I think of you only in idle moments for that’s all we were, Idle lovers, with idle sex when life was raining and there was nothing else to do.

There could have been nothing more, I’ve seen you, heard of you, your life is slow, gentled to passing moments and next breaths, nothing will get to you for you are nothing, do nothing, try nothing, dare nothing.

I can scream my denial of envy for life has scarred me, some little before you and plenty after, but you missed that in your need to be in love.

To create a prince from my frog and then how I wished you were my princess with a kiss and feeling then as now that such stories were only for death defying hope.

You couldn’t kiss me, change, transform my ugliness, as my raincoat, the holes within were mine only.

And none of this stopped us trying, what other game was there?

Neil Benbow

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