Thought Foxed

I MUST REMEMBER TO MEASURE MY HEAD. [For the forthcoming mortar board.]

I think my head may have stretched like elastic, about to snap, but my brain shrinks. Shrivelled by estate agents viewings viewings spelling my name over and over K-I-R-K phone calls ring ring ring constantly coming from my now psychedelic screen, cracked like my nerves. Making me shout about the Simon Amstell concept confusion and flail when cooking cheese sauce.

The phone calls also bring baking bagel smells and a whole community of Orthodox Jews. Stamford Hill, skullcaps, ringlets that swing on many ages of men. Wearing black, but not all doom and gloom when I answer and it leads me here.

The purple jumper has been found. Rain cannot enter bandstands. I drink Cava from plastic cups and laugh with boys and go back to being adolescent when my best friend lit my hair with a cigarette lighter to see what happened and cheap cider drove us to spin like dizzy ducks. I return to eating my Barbican Picnics. All this means that I retain my blood as the estate agent vampires suck suck suck it out of me. They suck like Marina Abramovic does when she discovers her Death self, inhaling another's exhaled air for a full seventeen minutes. Then she passes out. I pass out into her firestars and scrubbed skeletons and stomach-piercing rose thorns as respite from the ringing.

[Marina and her Death self]

Other vampires beckon. Original vampires of books, where books will be read and blood will not be drained, but flow, cheeks flushed by Whitby winds. My stake can be left behind for this better sort of vampire.