James Daniels


Boundaries

I would sit in the lobby of a huge shopping 
centre, asking men if they’d like to buy me
for a bounded time. How much, they’d ask,
how much, and long lists of prices
run through my head like a spinning slot machine.
What am I worth, what can I charge, what
would I buy me for? A sandy-haired man
fed me orange slices and I was his lover for a week.
A strange old man with gnarled yellow fingernails
gave me his dead wife’s mug collection
and twenty pounds pocket money a fortnight
and I lived with him for three months,
eating toast together in the mornings and
laying a blanket over his legs to keep him warm
watching TV in the evenings
before retiring to separate rooms. A stranger
in a business suit paid a four figure sum
in crisp clinical banknotes
for the pleasure of leaving me messy and
full of himself one night.
A little boy beggar gave me fifty pence and
a kiss on the cheek, and I held him close
to me and kept him warm while
his mother traded blowjobs for crack and fast food.
I charged him ten pence extra for the night she
overdosed and I waited with him for someone
to zip her cold corpse away. And then
you came, and made me the best offer yet:
oblivion for oblivion, two guns two bullets and
two bodies. Our lips met and all the cars
outside stopped as if on cue; I scratch
my confession into the wall of the bathroom stall;
we fall out of touch and blur past
our lines on the smooth floor, and
shoppers skirt around our negotiation.

James Daniels is a recent graduate from the University of Oxford, where they studied Spanish and Russian.

 
 

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