My God, It's Vivaldi

Richard Hillesley

double shot espresseo 

Out of the tube roars a train. A clot of blood stains the sky,    drip    drip    dripping. At evening the sky is like a painting by Kandinsky,  staves and shards of glass. Smoke rising from the fire on the next street. 

    At night the ghosts appear. God rides in a carriage down the Mall. The women beneath the streetlamps walk on stilts. Rabelais rides on a monkey's shoulder. 

    I give you the truth - a mixed economy. The moon and sixpence. Bloody Cupid's bloody arrow. The pigeon stone and Bistro droppings. One man spinning on his axis without a rag on, and another man pointing at the sky.

    A woman in high heels tugs at her tights, leans against a lamp post and blows kisses with her eyes. 

    And I see parliament in the glow of floodlamps, stage-lit, and I fall on the steps and howl at the gods. The bells in the tall towers ring. The moon rolls over and then is still.

    After the riot we step between the squares. The clouds are thin and scared, rippling across the sky. The police cars stalk the streets looking for young men to hit. A saxophone rips along an alley. And a woman on her way to the theatre says it is terrible. She knows what she would do.'This isn't Eastern Europe,' she says.    She reaches into a shattered window, and lifts a CD out of the rubble.'My God, it's Vivaldi,'she says, and puts it in her bag.

    'Just a bit of window shopping, eh?'says a roaming punk, and we laugh as the night crashes through the spring in the city.

About the author

Richard is a former editor of LinuxUser magazine, and has written features, poems and short stories for a wide variety of publications, most recently Storgy, Prole and The Angry Manifesto.