This is the house

1.

This is the house where he died.
This is the house where she slow-killed him from the inside.
In this dusty, damp and dirty dump.
In this grey teeter-totter terrace
on a trashed grey-gashed street - blitzed and bleached.
In this piss-poor bombed-out leftover -
a legacy of someone else’s war.
Behind this door, she left him cold.

/ …and you and I used to mean so much more
and you and I could have been so much more
when it was all just deep dreams and dark rooms
streetlights and the warm electric glow…

2.

This is the house where she marked her territory.
This is the house where she locked him out.
Forever now forbidden from her mind’s secret places -
though she’d pledged they’d always be his.
She fell silent, she went dark,
her eyes vehement and hard.
His naivety the victim,
the pain set in.

/ …and you and I used to mean so much more
and you and I could have been so much more
when we were lost in our own world
and the doors were shut tight…

3.

This is the house where she left him waiting.
This is the house where he’d lie sleepless, listening
to the gas fire hissing; and
to the cats squalling in the alley,
like babies possessed; and
to the foghorn in the estuary and
its melancholy warning
to each struggling soul left behind in distress.

/ …and you and I used to mean so much more
and you and I could have been so much more
when the pages turned slow
and we were still so certain and sure…

4.

This is the house where she’d return at dawn-time.
This is the house where she’d come back from the Night Line,
and to confuse him she’d kiss him
with cold, cold lips.
She smelled…strange somehow,
a smell sickening and sour.
The sterile scent of stagnant city at sunrise?
Or of someone a stranger no more.

/ …and you and I used to mean so much more
and you and I could have been so much more
remember that boat struggling against the tide?
or that moment on the steps of Sacré Coeur..?

5.

This is the house where she finally broke him.
This is the house where she set him adrift.
She let him go and she left him for dead.
Unsought solitude on the edge of the edge,
in this wind-blasted hole,
so very far from home.
At the end of the line -
the end of his time.

/ …and you and I used to mean so much more
and you and I could have been so much more
I gave you my everything - and so much more
bitter betrayal my sole reward…

Uppsala Cathedral ‘92

The Last of England