Cities Have Sexes: London Is A Man,

When I Saw Him Look At Me With Lust, I Dropped My Eyes But, In Glancing Away From Him, I Caught Sight Of Myself In The Mirror. And I Saw Myself, Suddenly, As He Saw Me, My Pale Face, The Way The Muscles In My Neck Stuck Out Like Thin Wire. I Saw How Much That Cruel Necklace Became Me. And, For The First Time In My Innocent And Confined Life, I Sensed In Myself A Potentiality For Corruption That Took My Breath Away.

Strangers Used To Gather Together At The Cinema And Sit Together In The Dark, Like Ancient Greeks Participating In The Mysteries, Dreaming The Same Dream In Unison.

For Hours, For Days, For Years, She Had Wandered Endlessly Within Herself But Never Met Anybody, Nobody.

The Only Time I Ever Iron The Sheets Or Make Meringues Is When There Is An ... Urgent Deadline In The Offing.

His Contagious Conviction That Our Love Was Unique And Desperate Infected Me With An Anxious Sickness; Soon We Would Learn To Treat One Another With The Circumspect Tenderness Of Comrades Who Are Amputees, For We Were Surrounded By The Most Moving Images Of Evanesecence, Fireworks, Morning Glories, The Old, Children. But The Most Moving Of These Images Were The Intagible Relfections Of Ourselves We Saw In One Another's Eyes, Reflections Of Nothing But Appearances, In A City Dedicated To Seeming, And, Try As We Might To Possess The Essence Of Each Other's Otherness, We Would Inevitably Fail.