Heaven

V: Heaven

Into eternity out of one stinking moment. Clocks reversing and the smashed bowl mends, wet salmon-gilded cloud sucked streaming back, inhaled by morning. Time is made a place, made London. Moment windows glinting, decade lanes, and that short Hercules forever stamping in its passages. He is not small, but only far away. He strides through bread riot, match-girl strike, and blitz, through joss-stick parks and dead princess's funeral. We can’t keep up with him. He barely keeps up with himself. That headlong charge down twelve streets at a time. He slams through low performance tables, school assembly halls, and rustles chip-wrap at the Proms. He almost runs. Along Museum Street in Duchamp stop-motion with too many arms that raise the hat, tap cane, check pocket-watch, like some fantastic engine, some hallucination, like some slumming Hindu god. Whirlwind litter skyjacked carrier bag his breath, aerosol hiss across election hoarding. Racing, pacing, he sees blossom flaming into slain Nigerian boys in trees at Peckham Rye, and God in Union Jack sunglasses and a guardsman's coat comes barrelling down Carnaby, and peering through a Broad Street window terrifies the child. He's all of him, at once. He barges from the manicurist in South Moulton Street with round the corner handle frowning. Hendrix bucket-splashing vandal sound like paint across the tidy precinct. Boots delighted through the silver scratch card drifts, grabs windfall figs up from his blind guest grave at Bunhill. And from Lambeth out by Waterloo his trains like Behemoth, complaining in the dark. Where by the tracks he’s writ great flaming names in spray, the giants of London's quarters now, sees Blad and pest and mane, and there in nude pink letters NoLove, weary Afric titan of the self, and on the high cloud buttered yellow by the moon he'll paint them, soapstone calf and bicep, a cyanic tincture in their modelling, their wide mad eyes stunned by the sun, by love, by tragedy, by everything. And higher still, blown tumbling through the searchlight pillars of a siren night, he sees hot Satan chains of electricity dragged in the lanes below and plunges down into the fireball knot of Soho. He pushes, rude and spluttering, through Les Miserables queues at Leicester Square, and waiting in her bonnet on the ghost of Green Street's corner, takes Kate by the arm, and they duck whispering down confetti alleys. Rent boy cherubs in the tangerine peel and the bubble wrap up Queen Anne's Court. He walks on with his wife, both made from sparks. It's not enough to study or revere him, only be him, kicking down the Greek Street night. And from the frot spots and the lesbo shows, the gleeful orgies of his margins spill into the road. Wet torso clay, lips, limbs and skin, in glistening miles grind yellow in the sodium lights. And smiling, he and Catherine hurry on, order cold mutton in Trattoria's, offer bouncers out, orange and turquoise sparklers in their fists, run up and down the moving stairs of Tottenham Court. Big Issue sailboat-folded for a crown, he's young again and she, and garden-bare they dance the swerving cabs down Oxford Street. He swings her by the waist and everywhere about them flutter cell phones, trilling. The lysergic smear of Russell Square, Huxley and Ginsberg call out to them, giggling and stumbling from the park. Beneath the museum portico he kisses her, and from its vaults reel festivals, parades. Pharaohs and Indian idols with a foam of Soma on their tusks, and alligators crawled up from the Thames, a heavy cancer crust of sapphires creaking on their hides, all teeming in the drunk sloped labyrinth. Time never happened. Past revised unendingly is but the fretful play of mind. We are not jailed by continuity. History’s prison bursts, its mortar only spit and wish. We caper outside and away. Now from the galleries and print shops are his fiends and marvels joined with the procession. He and Kate climb naked up astride Nebuchadnezzar’s back and ride him, thumbnails sparking through the torchlight. Here the real and unreal of the ages step together and embrace this place behind the verse, below the colour seeping from the squirrel hair, where wed the flesh and mind, the hand and eye, amongst the antic marriage guests. And in the rice and streamers and the copulation is his vision now descended to him as the woman in his soul who is Jerusalem, the bride, who is the shining city lowering from the firmament. For this is Golgonooza, sand-grained township of eternity, where now comes pleasure sweet Islamic angels as a gem flood pour, comes smiling houris in a streaming radiance, a comet wind. Light fluttering like pages, sound like oil, the ratio transcended in each tree. About him in his nude simplicity, a way to smouldering white, the spectre boil. He rails, divine in tongue but laborious speech, a gentleness more loud than cannon's boom and drafts creation from a tiny room. The universal there in his unique. Hands stained with Paradise or Milton’s Fall. He will not let the shock of being fade, but pummelled by the star stands weeping made a boy before the marvel of it all. Godiva sky and her atomic blush, the trailing peacock hem stained white with flair reflects in puddle mud, while everywhere, tattooed in heathen gold, the children rush. And all the wheeling cosmos comes to this, its orbits to an evening's walk pared down. Vast swirls made stains on Catherine's dressing gown and suns careening in the fond, brief kiss. His thumbprint's heat in every just fist curled, in hand on pen, or sharing the last crust. On lovers arse, or tumbling jails to dust, his rages, lusts and fears those of the world. He is our human compass, jumps, limbs splayed to all points, up from the common ground. In fireball dawn, mad glare, torrential sound, is William Blake, amazed and unafraid.