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We love urban, ice wrapper choc full, dense with matter, cream the power runs through, finding space, each cell. Unit, one by one, stacked upon deck, pile, floating concrete and multi access path. Crank each floor, glass patent steel, glint the Thames, Humber and Clyde, a boat in the reflection, slum cleared gentle penthouses on the other side. Dogged, ***** not allowed, Barking, Hackney, Toxteth, Little Ireland aka Cardiff gone. Dodo, hatchet, escalate poverty, high rise cool, the high rise flat.  Crowning glory, a sea of chiming memories, stirs the tenement cat. Swept beneath the paradigm, catapult off the parapet, somersault into a different time, moonlit skyscrapers, street sweepers become the concrete and the fifty foot glass dancers, cross between the cargo arches, gargoyles and shields bring them to the ground. The twisted metal of prams and brand new cars grind, traffic in drones, and the city drowns. Strip turn central, gorgeous girl, Hoxton lad, a touch too Dad, deposit on a Liverpool street pad, generation retro spinning fractal, money linear pavement uber yellow, scuttling insects and street martins, skylarks flying Saint Pauls cross and ball bearings, shopping centres unending. Biting into Cheapside, the hidden livers, gold delivers, pure to stay the shivers, the office block rises. Sharp bends, the bridge divides, shark rides the sky, dumps the bank and pierces its side, docks in every city worldwide, rivers pink with the ticklish blood of regicide. Pumpish, Victorian, sweet and blue, the older the City the quicker the glue. Mortar rectified a moment to ***** and overawe you. Shock, new wave architecture, backhanded awe. Brum pill wave beast eat your heart out, find another Chinese storm, currency blizzard, scales hardly balance, aha you had it, now you simply own. Own the moment, the pebbledash, corrugated roof, outside toilet and underground transit. We love urban, your moment we cherish and drain, there is nothing we can’t refuse to understand, too complex to refrain. Bounce as we ride the terrace and its suburban long train. Take your sweetheart on the nightbus, ****** him her, the hier of your plane, that’s where they will love you in the memories of the life near the top floor, and the final flight you were too drunk to gain. Seventy Two, you’re only thirty and you’re on forty one. You’ll fall back or you’ll begin ascendency. Shrink with wisdom, pick up the building, a tool, dreaming of scaling London, young a journeyman, jousters young son, learned, resisted the gun. I’ll fight with two hands, pile bricks or guide with a pen. Draw your city, write my memory, bind moment with every fragment, underpath, cycle through. Lights fading, jumping colours in the district where the girls who live the density beyond you and me, each element boiling their hearts and steaming potent New York’s paths. You had poetry in the apron of your mother’s lap, golden syrup and milky sap. You love urban, fifties bubble contrast in your seventies shunted through urban oasis and with that unknown factor, uber bijou, ‘Finding Nemo’ flat. We are urban, you are fashion, you are the generation that copied that, found the culture in the swinging city, post uni shack. Seven Eleven, Atlantic side heaven, promised more than double checking your watch before bedtime. Look at your daughter, she’s got ‘more than’ you hoped for, already in the palm of her sleeping hands, waking up to a metropolis only she will understand.
nick armbrister Apr 2018
On Camera

My life is like a movie

Seeing that replica Mustang roll in and crash at the airshow

My life is like a movie
Witnessing an ex dealer who'd just been shot in his home

My life is like a movie

Viewing Oldham riots on TV that were five minutes away

My life is like a movie

Gazing down upon Manila Bay at the enduring sunrise from Bataan

My life is like a movie

Observing different people and cultures in a dozen countries

My life is like a movie

Glancing at my thigh as the tattooist inks my goth girl tattoo

My life is like a movie

Noticing the Mancunian drunks fighting on the nightbus home

My life is like a movie

Gaping in desolation at the coffin that contains my mum

My life is like a movie

Watching the mad Irish man loop the Grumman Duck in Murphy's Law

My life is like a movie

Admiring the **** girls I've nailed in the big bakery

My life is like a movie

Scrutinizing the Asians to see if they'll try to assault me


My life is like a movie
Eyeballing my soon to be ex friend who's kissing my girlfriend
My life is like a movie
Focusing on the road ahead as I illegally race the other car
My life is like a movie
Staring at the men lying by the kerb wondering are they dead?
My life is like a movie
Studying the vertical cliff above me to find a way up
My life is like a movie
Peering into the sky to find my dad's ghost that's up there
My life is like a movie
Scanning at my wage slip to see if my pay will cover my beer and bills
My life is like a movie
Regarding my mate who just vomited up his kebab and chips
My life is like a movie
Glimpsing the chavs fighting the teenage couple over the river
My life is like a movie
Right till my last breath and final vision when my Goddess takes me home
Listening
to the rain outside
and the thunderstorm within.

Watching
you sleeping beside me,
asking myself
“What am I doing here?”

Perhaps
I should get dressed,
let myself out
and get the nightbus home.

Then again,
I could stay here
with the sound of the rain in my ears
and you in my arms.

— The End —