Thick poetry: Soho after dark

Two wounded narcissists floating down Dean Street Overshadowed by a bruised sky that rains twilight stars Wetting their hair Scarring the ground Tearing the fabric of the sky - A tattered chiffon shroud Their only protection against the oncoming storm Pounding its beat (Malicious tyrant) Smiling on the iniquity of their embrace Becalmed A thirsty sailor On a whisky sea Drink me till your lips bleed The ocean whispered Come drown in me Morpheus stood on deck And stared into his love Broken glass on a frozen lake in the summer breeze Laudanum sleep Brought Auden's revolting succubus But his eyes were open His soul was closed And his eyes were borscht Devil moonrise played across time bleached beard And the sea laughed at him I step out Into the thick air Lond'n at night So cold it burns my lungs And then A silent deafening scream As my brain convulses at the scent Expensive smoke from a lazy Galoise Fragrances my lungs And my clothes Breath fogs in the thick air And the man in the cream mac Disappears into the ether A wraith dissolving into the fog Twilight falls fast The fog turns the colour of sloe Then houndstooth grey Then midnight black I step into a taxi And leave … Last night it rained So I stood under a street lamp And smoked And my friend burnt out And the street lamp went out And I stood in the dark And I coughed And the street lamp came back on The rake passed And passed on The illusion of understanding Into your eyes Yet they were mirrors to him Licentious fop Nihilistic cad Puritanical libertine Traced his crimson nails Through velvet garden To the goldmine in the trees Diamonds still sparkle in the gloom But breathe And they will blow out As candles gutter Before the long shadows gather And consume Well … you loved him for that one moment “why are men such beasts darling?” You looked old this morning Like you aged 34 years in the time I'd been asleep Then you stir and it passes 21 again Mumbled concatenation Will follow Tabula rasa of a windswept mind Sets an empty breakfast table With ebony idols and old teeth And we drink orange juice Off a yellowed piano And share the last slice of toast The morning is soft And wet leaves plaster the cold ground Turning it molten gold Bleeding with autumnal tears The wind makes the trees cry And we stand in their fall We kiss you say good bye And I walk away A mere shipwreck Soho is an area of London, bound by the A40 to the North, Chinatown to the South, Charing Cross road to the East and Regent Street to the West, with many of London's most esteemed tailoring houses lying beyond this Western border on Savile Row. In Soho, tailors offer the same handmade quality but with their own idiosyncrasies. Sir Tom Baker bring a punk flavor to his tailoring with zips, studs, and skull buttons, Mark Powell blends gangster chic with mod and neo-Edwardian influences, and Chris Kerr nonchalantly dresses many of the titans of the music and film industry. Soho has always been about entertainment of one form or another, and the historical sex industry centered around Brewer Street is no exception—with the neon-lit sex shops adding to the cultural milieu. The first four poems incorporate snatches of overheard conversation and clippings of song lyrics that streamed out of pubs and bars into Soho's night time streets. In this way, they are partly a bricolage drawing on element of Dada but ultimately attempt to phenomenologically evoke the atmosphere (following Ingold 2015, 73–78) of London's Soho after dark. I frame this creative ethnographic praxis as a kind of thick poetry, building on Geertz's (1973) concept of thick description, but also Deger's (2016) notion of “thick photography.” This poetic style intentionally juxtaposes an author's voice who, at time, inhabits the characters he observes, with shifting interpretations of the language used. This intellectually embraces Wittgenstein's (2009) notion of Sprachspiel to accentuate the problem of interpretation when dealing with snatches of overheard conversation and new ethnographic informants. Following Maréchal and Linstead (2010), these five poems seek to capture the moment being witnessed—linguistic photographs of a sort. They are not metropoems, following Jouet (2000), but do take inspiration from the urgency given to witnessing an individual moment in the field and needing to capture it. It is apt that Linstead (2022, 111) draws comparison between the smartphone camera and the poem, as well as how the process of a quick snap versus a carefully composed image changes both the outcome and the intellectual and artistic meaning of the finished object—particularly when trying to capture something quickly. This speaks to the simultaneous visual ethnographic work that was conducted alongside writing these poems (see Bluteau 2021, 2022) throughout the period of fieldwork, and demonstrates how moving beyond ethnographic prose allows us to “see … differently” (Linstead 2022, 102). No funding was received for this research and there is no conflict of interest to report. There is no conflict of interest to report. Ethical approval for this research was granted by the University of St Andrews Ethics Committee.