The Caliphate Motel (Part II)

Cherry

By Michael Valentine

Sun, 10 May 2015
  • 880 reads
2 comments
 
The Caliphate Motel (Part II)
 
Below a naked light-bulb
In the kitchenette of a room named, 'The Ketamine Lounge'
In the basement of The Caliphate motel,
and on a typically gloomy Whitechapel morning,
Megan and I were scouring the bookshelves
     looking for patterns, numerical
or blood-splattered
When by mistake, no fake,
Meg's nose bled and dripped
And when the blood from your nose hits the floor that fast
Then, my friend, you can't help thinking that the next high will be your last
      Megan's blood splashed, like milk sloshing from a mug of tea
And six droplets landed softly on a worn and tattered William Blake
      His poem to Nobodaddy:
It was strewn in synthetic sunshine, nicotine stains
and age; Megan's blood, Megan's mucus,
Megan's clumps of clotted cocaine
      volatile, potent yet agonisingly useless
 
Blood on the walls
Blood on the bog-roll
Blood on the pillow
And blood on her grandmother's Paisley shawl
 
The pages of that book are now sellotaped to the door
of a studio we'll name, "An Italian Horror in London",
on the second floor of the Caliphate Motel
Brick and mortar, steel beams rented by and glossed in
     the aterial spray of a NatWest bank-teller
A real yellow fellow, whose fingers tickled
      the silent alarm on the wrong day
      in front of the wrong pistol
So, the right I determined, I had to take another's life,
And if you need to ask why, you're missing the point
You see, me and my wife Megan, aren't doing so well
And England owes us a living
She owes us the right to an existence
 
And so she paid us our dues
     with the filthiest money she could find
And taught us that with a gun in one's denim waistband
It's easy to forget who one is in this wasteland
Because we rolled that dirty money,
we injected that dirty honey
And we shut ourselves away in Whitechapel because back home
our friends and families were being marched into Utopia by fanatics,
Megan and I decided there and then to live underwhelmingly
On tea and coffee, toast, smack and the fumes of melted plastic,
Second-hand books, withering looks and celibacy
 
Goodbye, Megan
I've been in this room for sixteen years
and I can't remember what colour the walls are
Certificate 15
Poem
Surreal
Drama
Horror

Comments

Submitted by london_calling79 on

I really enjoyed the remnants of rhyme washed through here. A stark piece. I'm off to read part I.

 

Submitted by VeraClark on

The underground painted vividly with uppers and downers and blood.