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Once, when I left a wife for a swirl of cotton, I told a friend that one day I would live alone in a dumb apartment in an old, ugly town.
I made it!
There are two kebab vans outside and the late, late nights are noisy, violent, and smelling of dubious meats. It’s a Wednesday night so one a.m. is late enough: the fat girls have all gone home, the bikers have biked, the square is pocked with the yellow slugs of discarded vegetables, and in an hour or two I may be able to sleep. A white police car slides through.
Yes, I still believe in love - what we take for love, what we take. When I am in love I am tail-wagging happy, as happy as a double-dicked dog. This is me para-sailing.
I have no baggage. (It’s arriving tomorrow on a truck.) Love me, love my hyperbole, the bigger the better, as big as a mountain, shiny as the Twin Towers. Yes, I am reliable. I am as reliable as an IKEA Bookcase. I would prefer to start with coffee, a lunch-time (easier to get away if it’s menopausally horrible.)
I believe there are things we will never see. I have been between, here, there and everywhere. I believe woman is full of sorrow, even when she thinks she's happy. My favourite nouns are banana and tyrant.
I have few qualifications but trained as a clown. When I was a boy I wanted to be a pirate. I like Lego. My favourite poem is “Do Not Go Gentle.”
I believe where there's a will there's a fucking argument. I contemplate my various deaths. I occasionally think of slaughter and I read about plagues.
This is one of the bad days. It's the emptiness, Wednesday is a hollow day. One of the fat girls has died black hair, black, black; black as a bat. She is the only person in the world worse off than me (see mountains, Twin Towers.)
I am getting back into shape. (The gym is somewhere to go.) Wednesdays is the fruit, the whole fruit, and nothing but the fruit. I don’t date on Thursdays. I tend to shit a lot on Thursdays.
My favourite photograph is the one where there’s a skirt, a shirt on some shiny floor, the rubble before the war. I like the blind, denying optimism.
I wish I had been a miner. I wish I had been simpler. I wish a woman, Winceyette, bony, had made my snap every morning at four o’clock, and sent me off to the pit with my little tin. I wish I could look forward to the blackcurrant jam, the thin slices.
Sometimes I imagine I am in my hut in Merioneth. It is raining, raining, raining, but the anger doesn’t touch my little hut. I am a poet there, in Merioneth. I am aware that I suffer from a lack of moral fibre.
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