The beauty of Marina is like ...

This is what I wrote her, in the hope of securing a date or some conversation - it was accompanied by an appropriate note of course. She is from a country in Eastern Europe, a particular country whose citizens I now understand to prize their freedom more than almost anything else. But I didn't know where she was from until I'd almost finished writing it - didn't even know her name until then.

Groping for patterns, for meaning, for something that fits I seize on the apparent connection between freedom and rejection, the fluidity of beauty and the association with the city. London, I realise, I associate with nothing so much as freedom - a generalised freedom of existence and of mobility, inasmuch as it is possible within a civilisation. Ironically I suppose. But above all the anonymity, the ability to dissolve completely and yet exist so splendidly.

To be honest, I’m not sure what sort of girl would show any kind of interest in a guy who tries to woo her in this way. That is not to say I don’t think there aren’t any, God forbid I should become so cynical. Perhaps therein lies the answer to the question who or what it is that I am looking for: for such a person as would be interested - or for freedom. Perhaps both.

Yes, sometimes I take myself a little seriously. So, on a lighter note ... Eh, yes, and fwiw and to protect her identity, her name isn’t really Marina.

To Marina

Marina, your beauty is to me
like night-time London's West End streets
that speak and rattle restlessly
through Soho's shadows steeped in unrequited sleep;
down Regent Street at Christmas
where the city sings its venal neon hymns -
and between lattes a shopper hears
forgotten fears, and a broken promise murmuring.
Your beauty is on the Underground
in shaven chins and silences of worshippers
who sway and pray in those cathedrals now
as havens, then transitions. Some disappear.
Marina, although you come from far
I see your beauty where you are.