I am surrounded by scum. I say I, I could say we, but who am I to speak for the rest of you. I am drinking coffee at a table in a café. The view from the window is of a street. It is not a remarkable street. It is in fact a hugely unremarkable street filled with cars and taxis and buses and stores and offices and peoples. I am watching this scene and swallowing fast. I am dragging on a Marlborough Light; my attempt to produce smoke rings failing pathetically - silver clasps rising and dispersing into the nicotine filled air. I am feeling nauseous. I despise everything around me. I need something to clear my head. I finish my coffee (decaffeinated) and beckon a refill: the waitress responds with a promptness I admire. I watch him clean a nearby table. His efficiency pleases me. I drink one more cup. I lick my finger and finger the sugar bowl. I imagine fucking her, the waitress, perhaps on this table, on this slab of cheap pine, or in the dunes in the twilight of dusk perhaps. My mouth fills with sweetness. I feel slightly less stressed. I attempt a crossword. I drink more coffee. Steam and cigarette smoke rise into the space above my head. I close my eyes. Transparent shapes drift through my vision. The world through my closed eyes is amber and then red. I am imagining, chasms of blood beading from the plastic sky that is now inside my head, beneath a ceiling of flesh that is hanging above my ugly infested world. I am seeing all these things on the inside of my mind, beneath these closed eyelids that develop the subconscious visions of the world like photographs to be stored. I remember the faces of people I have seen: ticket inspectors, shop assistants, keepers at the zoo feeding polar bears, game show hosts in silver suits, actors in commercials selling life insurance, school friends, neighbours, tramps drinking white spirit, work colleagues. I am indifferent to them all. I am indifferent to it all. My mind has drawn from the love that ached and made me agonize and create paranoia (for real love conceives a deadly fear of loss) and the increasingly frantic tide of joy and paranoia that swept beneath, and over me as only boundless love can, taking me along in a circus of manic emotion…..love…..fear…love again….insecurity….deep…..insecurity…..manic…..frantic…..lovely….. wonderful love…..caressing…..stroking…..warming - as only a spring sun can do on a cool dawn, standing on the soft sand, your beautiful toes entwined with mine. Being swept over by the chasing green ribbon of the sea, dancing over our feet and over our bodies, taking us down into the ebbs and flows of the drifting currents, rising only for small gentle gasps of air that are so clean and pure and unpolluted. I am seeing her as this angelic figure, her perfect body as a cream shell, rising up from the blue expanse of the sea, the force of the flow of the currents taking us this way and that, our bodies sinking and drifting: one moment our faces warmed by the pale disc of the sun, the sky blue and crimson and striped with trails of vapour – next - we are taken down into the grey abyss of this underwater world, our whole beings submerged, our bodies heavy and out of control, being taken away into a kingdom of caves and rock pools, starfish and rays dancing along the sea floor, sunlight streaming through the transparent roof of the water’s ceiling. I want to stay here forever. I am wanting to stay in that perfect moment…..love…..beauty…..don’t my darling…..don’t leave me……don’t darling take this from me - you are all I am…..do not destroy me…….do not destroy me…..do not destroy me.