Heeling like an unbalanced sailor into the salt spray of his own eye, a beer-walker, stamping his dulled paces into the innocent ground beneath him – there go I, unreceived by her whom I have just deceived, my last trick falling from a hastily still unbuttoned sleeve, the warm stained bed behind felt only as a chill down my spine. Leaning a shoulder to a lamppost in a halo of yellow light, I piss my relief into the night like a dog. Look, world, smell now the place where I have been, come sniff at my residue, taste the mangled odours of my mixed metaphors and find me wanting. And so he plunges on, headlong into the night that bites out the spaces between the lights, head still reeling from drink and the deeds it made him do. Sick of his own innocence, he throws his guilt on the door you have locked before him. A door his key no longer fits, as if somehow, it has ceased to know me. And he looks at myself, and I know he is right.