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There’s nothing open but newsagents and one garage for twenty miles. A ruddy old sod toe-punts his dog where ribs aren’t because it wont stop champing grass: silver-grey, sharp as dune greenery.
They drag inbetween industrial hangars where coloured plastic gets moulded into novelty items like a space gun that coughs sparks and garden Hoovers sonic-welded together wrong by an old friend’s youngest brother and his girl never out of long-sleeves: her make-up is the black shaggy ink-caps drip in the shadows of bus shelters.
Inside, a blown-speaker echoes jingles off a corrugated wall. Warmed polymers make heads spin as they fiddle stuff together; the clock hands whiz. Hercules blundering out of cloud cover melt a sports report into white noise and the radio picks up a control tower you won’t find on maps, directing the lads home: they stretch and leak stories that would make you unsure if you’re meant to laugh or stand very still, and do nothing.
Amazing, the talk you talk for hours as if each word is white hot to be gobbed out before it burns; you leap days
and continents like a super hero so much to tell, so little time and you're right, the mitten-ed arson threatens it, worn out broilers at work, those ants, the first twinge of a toenail growing down. Inhale:
then your Dad cuts in, his ox tongue can't/won't lay still so it's science and BT cables, the piggyback of info down ISDN lines (I still don't get it) the long weight of the moon, bread crumb stars and his misplaced brother, sewn up with fluff behind his jacket lining-
another respray, tread worn bald the price of tea till our innards are tanned when your Mum storms in with a thirst for cheese and it's Alf about to shake himself to bits, the letter he wrote, pen in both hands, to thank her.
And the headlines, yesterday's from three doppelganger tabloids, the ins and outs of tragedy as seen from the dark side of a dining table
and it's the fires still belching and a stupid war raging stupidly that briefly winds us.
because last night he took ecstasy and cocaine and drank and was dancing until three o’clock when he saw an old flame and got talking and they did another pill each (of what he isn’t sure) then they went back to his house where they took another pill to calm themselves down so they could at last drop into sleep, ears ringing like an old television set on its way out, light fizzing from the curtain, birds singing.
He turned up, red-eyed taller than everyone else that spilled from the tube station. We had a big cappuccino each and talked as fast as we used to when I would stay over in the big, posh, messy house his dad had had built where we would watch anything until Ceefax came on and then he would tell me stupid, impossible stories about celebrities. I believed every single one.
Unchecked, perspective bends its own rules along skirting boards, dadoes, fidgeting to please be excused.
The cutlery drawer is a convoluted mantrap; primed, extravagantly painful in novelty, stainless-steel ways.
A shower of high-speed morse on the sunroom’s cracked plastic tells off of you in forensic detail.
Furry Leylandii silhouettes lean in to earwig, bristle like geed up mammals devoid of faces, genitals, all but one stiff limb.
Tongue between teeth, careful, you talk slower, for instance, to a neighbour about dried chicken blood as fertilizer:
his passion flowers’ fruit is the product of fancy upholstery, bubble gum and mouse livers.
Knots in pine stare blind at Artex, lino; embarrassed, a handful of daffs droop trumpets. The bomb in the clock is taking forever.
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