The Ballad of Tokyo Jo (from 'Ballade Noire')

I lit a cigarette
and stared through the blinds.
I watched as the rain ran stitches
across a wounded dusk.
The day had tried to heal itself
but had succumbed
and festered into bruise-black night.
I hated the rain,
it made me think
of gloomy childhood outings
to dead seaside towns.

I took my hat and my gun
from the desk
and slipped out the back way
under a canopy of fire escapes
and vents with small metal hats
that steamed and wheezed bronchially
into the dimly lit alley.

I flanked the city centre
with its gawkers, stalkers,
talkers and hawkers
in their shades of deadly-night.
Acting out their low-slung
parody of b-movies
and cheap novels.
Angelic in their bleached
fluorescent faces.

I ducked across
the sweat stained streets
and melted into the neon blaze
of the ‘Sushi House’.
There you were,
across the bar
sipping Beaujolais
in cartoon silhouette,
animated by a river of flashing tail-lights.
Your long shadow
in soft tones of tobacco aged wood,
floated in a river of mercury.

I took a seat across the bar,
poised, in a deadly poker game
I paused
then played my hand.
Frame by frame the bullets
ripped into the picture
and I shuddered
as thunder tore through my body.
There was a pause
for realisation
then pain struck
in great blinding forks
arcing across my mind.

The last thing I heard
was not the voice of God
or my mother
but my own.
White noise,
word upon word until
all I could hear was deafening static.
Then someone turned the volume off.