In the Movies 2

The great yellow movie come-down; the most beautiful part retrospectively, emereing into the already night-time street, a peep of blue night-time intruding, as you move down the stairs from your artificial world of light and shade, sci-fi acid blast, all the great romances and ghosts, all the funereal love of cinema smells, whispers, anguished laughs in the back row.
So in the anxious lobby there's nothing to do but traipse out onto the pavement, halting outside for a while, murmuring to each other, movie talk giving way to silence as you ponder the walk home through grey-scuffed streets. The swishing trees, the shut-up shops. Back home to lamp-lit bedrooms and TV, bright-coloured comicbooks, cotton sheets.
Who says there is no sacrament in our lives when we can emerge from the movie house into blue evening, stark yellow lamplit, with full and melancholy hearts, replete and utterly satisfied with the knowledge of our own deaths, in a soundless heel-scuffing moment. Who can ever look at us and say we have no knowledge of love, if we only experience that moment, though we can never speak of it, though we can only watch and know. You take your salvation where you find it. Always deep tinges of death in beauty.

In The Movies

And on the scarred, fag-laden road
Still soft with evening dreams, molten lamp-light
Gentle haggard sidewalk.
Outside cinema where in afternoons the kids would gather
In long worried lines, buzzing all doleful excitement.
Sweet-shop next door, sleepily guarded but open,
Sunday afternoons the best, innocent leaning against hoardings.
We were innocent; i insist on that.
Soft and anxious for inside, inside.
There were kids wrapped in bright sports clothes,
Soft and full of lust for the movie.
Carpet hush inside, the spirit flickers and filters on the threshold.
Smell of hot-dogs on a lazy Saturday, yellow electric light in one cloistered discreet window. The proprietor, a bespectacled Englishman, calls out, shuffling businesslike to grey pavement.
We went sallow-faced after buying ticket up grey stairs, carpeted and winding to the secret summit. Oh plastic whiteness, oh unthinking technicolour. Eyes affixed on screen.