the heart's desire

****] heart
****] absolutely
****] I can
****]
] would be for me
] to shine in an answer
****] face
****]
****] having been stained
****]

The starred heart, hardly recognizable, not even yours.The heart's endless desire to break.The coal fires are nearly exhausted, and it's not really bitterly cold anyway. There's still enough warmth in your body, even at 12 at night, out in the open.The rooftop restaurant buzzes with hushed expectation. The fires, the flaky ash-grey embers, are moved to one side and the well-worn carpets are rolled out. Some sort of second-hand Persian stuff.

The red and blue notes are tossed into the air; cheap Bollywood numbers blare out into the dark night sky. Alcohol starts to flow, the empty bottles kept neatly on the floor. Old a_ slouches in his chair, his arms folded, resting on his knees. He still has his silly brown wool hat on. He looks on at the scene unfolding before him, memorizing it, or so it seems to me; he's like the last man on Brighton pier, looking out to the sea for a kind of lost freedom.

Someone else, who you don't even know, reaches out with one arm, like an old grizzly bear trying to claw at what he can't have. He mumbles some tune to himself as he does so. You can see he's intoxicated by it all. By now the academics and the sufis have left. J says to me: "If I'd wanted to see so many fat people, I would have stayed at home!"

Sherry blushes like a 12 year-old girl, with all the attention he's getting.

The dances: mostly boring. But one woman in particular is spectacularly beautiful. Large brown eyes, sometimes softly burning, at other times sparkling. Her hair down to the small of her back, a silvery blue and green 'choli', with a strapped back. Thin, tall-ish. Smooth, bronzed legs.

All sounds very decadent, I know. But it wasn't. Cross my heart, and hope to die.