Fierce Midnights

Slipping on oozing germoline ointment squished underfoot, she lurches, feet arching over knees like a Viennese showhorse's dance towards the brown plywood fire escape door. Cold, the bar's metal pressed down in fingerless-gloved hands, fingers grasp suddenly sensing the change from the two-bar fire that glows in the corner splitting light in luminous waves.
'I don't like it here; have to get out, have to go', her voice shimmering off brick as winter stabs her skin with fractious tinkling shards, echoes from cement, where ferns dangle ominously. Prehistoric greens dance in waterfall motion, the bricks' orange suffused with violet tinges, shapes in five dimensions looming with each shuddering of iron underfoot. Down, reverberating in bases and trebles towards concrete of pebbles and fragmented glass slivers. Another world.
He doesn't follow, content, wrapped in vibrations of trance grazing woodchip walls, the lava lamp low as trails fascinate his fingers. The shoreline's low now, waste of oil from the steelworks washed with driftwood still backward towards furnace chimneys, flames licking the orange skyline over grey-brown sea.
'I don't like it. Where are you? I don't like it, I said...' and the drum drum drum of electronic beats suffuses with cicadas unseen but heard in the constant of their stolen midnight.
He follows seemingly languishing in her unrest, his smile to her a leer, grotesque shapes from the shadows of garages where gravel crunches beneath bootsoles, fingers clenching oversprayed hairspikes in nervous twists and pinches. She waits with the darkness of untime. Through arching greens of bushes, the horizon dinosaurs of poplar, swirling clouds catch colour lit in neon from below. Sounds like the birth of creation chirrup softly beneath squawks and rustling unknownness.
And they stand on the bridge over cars which trail reds and yellows like fast-motion New York in the movies, the wind blowing spray from the sea like mist, salting skin in sticky dust. She could walk now, walk over the flatness from here, remembering stories of past tragedies of chemical innocence.
Industrial structures of tall metal frames distant with flaming licks of light reflect in saline pollution, sand slipping as mattress foam as they step. Faces glowing round fires, guitars and songs sung as she sits now, an ethereal white-clad woman, dreadlocks curl moving like snakes' tails, now vines. In her eyes, her face returned in light, hollow, joined as one, lips brush soft warm damp as moss.
'Come on. Lena? Come on.'
But she doesn't want to leave, grasps flesh feels skin, cloth like silk on bony shoulders, breast brushing breast; backs shiver in sea-cold air. The fire soothes yet prickles. Senses envy, though he isn't her man. And his face distorts to mohicaned gargoyled mouth, twisted fingers in putty, water as liquid mercury.
'Stop it, be you. Be you again. BE YOU,' and he takes her hand, pulling her towards streets that bend uphill, lights rainbowed in sound, shells of figures brushing silhouttes of song. Smells suffuse in intoxicating greens, smoke curls in words towards home.