[James Midgley]

.

Berlin Grey

At the club’s entrance my companion gives a spiel
about freedom and body acceptance to the bouncer
who buys it, ushers us over the threshold

down damp steps on which one man is fellating another,
knelt as if in prayer, the receiver's eyes wide
but face deadpan, twunk body clad in dungarees.

In the antechamber we use stickers to hide
our phone cameras' narrowed eyes, strip off our day
time clothes and change into facsimiles of nudes.

An ecstatic cherry has been disemboweled to create
the red-lit chill-out zone where two mohawked tanktops
are carpenting each other into muscular crates.

One room over, the bloodied black iron lip
of a rusted cage swings open onto chains and bolts
that glimmer with cigarettes in slow collapse.

The walls piss nervously. Bass like a bluebottle.
We smear ourselves to the front of one DJ booth
and stand like cattle inside waiting pelts.

At the bar we order water but the river Lethe
has sweated over it -- he hands back too much change
and the water dizzies with the wingdust of moths.

The music clarifies like butter, the clangour
of a passing metro train that will not pass us by.
Our outlines in ascendance gather at the dungeon

ceiling and drip back down. I think of your balcony
facing a Prenzlauerberg street, the one you tried
to paint in the rain -- in the colour 'Berlin Grey'.


.

[Cally Conan-Davies]

James, you don't play with language, you play in it—to the pure delight of this reader!

Rhymically alive! And I love how we get different 'positions': ecstasy (beside oneself), descent (down steps, into dungeon) and ascendence (shadows rising). We appear to be everywhere in this nowhere (now here) place. So many points of view! Transcendent!

I love every line break. Each one serves a purpose. All the crazy, funny details -- Lethe sweating over it, the too much change, walls pissing . . . your eyes go everywhere, and keep moving.

It's all about looking, actually. Voyeuristic. So many shades of tone.

And more than this, because the final stanza undercuts, brings complexity and poignancy to the scene you've built. It's wonderful the way the poem moves to the memory of another person, another place, and an image of unrelenting greyness, and failure, really -- grey day, rain, grey paint -- that contrasts with the redlit gyrating underworld that precedes it. Trying to paint in the rain, especially grey—it's a great image to end with. It turns a fabulously decadent scene into something else entirely. Lots to meditate on, this poem.

So playful, and so much control of the language at the same time.

A wholehearted great big YES from me!


Cally