cultured like a pearl

In London I slept on a mattress on the floor and woke up to tea with milk in first and cereal that comes in blocks. I went to the British Museum where every sign tells you not to touch the art, tells you about the oils on your skin, which all I could imagine was the imprint of a hand, the memory of a fingerprint, I wanted so badly to touch everything, the folds of Demeter's dress, the hollows where the noses were missing, the velvet ropes. I hesitated over beer and fish and chips, but finally ate chicken tikka and drank crisp cider. I walked around in the dark and watched people kissing in a telephone booth in a diner, and a beautiful woman with wide eyes and an unplaceable accent wrapped my hands around a glass of poison and made me give it to her; later she put her arms around me from behind and whispered in my ear what would happen next, and then it did. I wanted to dance but I did not. We talked about poetry and ate vegetarian peking duck and spoke to random Czech people, as one does in in a Chinese restaurant. In the morning I cursed London outlets and we went to the portrait gallery to see where Julia Roberts broke up with Clive Owen and to puzzle over Andy Warhol. I had coffee and chocolate caramel and coffee and a brownie and coffee and they weren't serving sweets so I ate the brown sugar lumps in the bowl on the table. I walked past more art than I could see and finally stood in front of two paintings and wept with happiness that they had been painted. I thought a lot more about creativity, the old man in the wheelchair still making art, then bedridden, his assistant a beautiful live thing in the room, following his directions to help him continue to create even as he dies, the primary colors of a child's garden and her red red lipstick. In a rainstorm we ducked into a cocktail bar with surrealist photographs on the wall, a skull and a butterfly flickering in the candlelight, and I drank a lavender fizz, which tasted like springtime, the opposite of outside and a perfect contrast to the deep leather chairs. We saw a ballet that was a naked nightclub of strobe and boredom beyond tedium, what I can say is that it was wonderful to see so many people at the theater and the men's room line snaking up the stairs as it usually only does at sports events. We ate more and drank more and got lost and took a taxi and talked about The Knowledge and I fell asleep on a mattress on the floor and woke up and handed my toiletries to a stranger at the airport and came home.