Sylvie Hill

Si

So I’ve Washed My Hands Of Us.

Cairo, you’re hot as fuck!
I saw you laid back
On your back
With a banana on your shirt
Wanted to crawl up from your knees
Past your belt
To your face
And lay on top you in the dirt.

Cairo, you’re hot as fuck!
Enigmatic smile
Of sadness
Makes all the girls wanna
JUMP UP, come running to save
Your fuckin’ soul!
As girls do
With deadhead skaters
And stoners.

Cairo, you’re hot as fuck!
Floating in the Nile
With a helmet on
Hands pumping paddle
With a mischievous smile.
You’d love ‘em and
Break women’s hearts
Leave the girls
In the dust.

Cairo, you’re hot as fuck!
Full of fuel and wanting to
Set fires to schools
That flunked ya.
You’re a different one
I know your kind
The artist brain
And that anti-establishment
Frame of mind.

Cairo, you’re hot as fuck!
First time I saw you
I was deep in lust.
But conflicted, preoccupied
With the Muse
London town.
When you added red,
French authors and Jacques Brel,
When you mentioned Mike Patton
And the skate vid,
And your A/V expertise
Of family vids and
about Gaspar Noe’s acoustics,
And the Serge Gainsbourg
And the dock-reading binder list,
And a mom who read Bovary
Well, I was hooked,
thought:
Gentleman,
To boot.

But Cairo’s in conflict.
And I am searching treasures
still at the bottom of the South Bank
in London.
I don’t want to drag any man
Into this
not with the blood
and the ink still fresh
in my hands.
And here you are
Just two hours:
I told you it could happen.
That you’d become a character
In a story at a time
When I’m not so together.

Someone crossed my boundaries, Cairo
I must make a deal of quality, and fuss.
I’m hard to understand like pyramids
So I’ve washed my hands of us.

And when you said that song was awful
Just like London who’d say “that’s bloody terrible!”
And when you blankly stated
“I just didn’t like the song at all is all.”
It reminded me of when London would say
“Just because someone doesn’t say what you’d like
doesn’t make them a dickhead.”
And it underlined how London said:
“If I can’t tell you what I don’t like when you write
then we will have a problem.”
And all this made Cairo, to me, really hot
And to cool me down, I disconnected
And washed my hands of us.

© Sylvie Hill 2014

Art: dixon / Paintings for Articulate Baboon Gallery, Cairo / 2010