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In Primrose Hill the yuppies go between the cafes, row on row, that mark the street, and buy and buy from chic boutiques with prices high expensive tops with necklines low.
We are alive, and mean to show our barest chests at sunset’s glow, tight jeans and a discerning eye in Primrose Hill.
We have no quarrel, brook no foe, but walk in peace amidst the flow of handsome folk who wander nigh and wonder, in the whole world, why others do not abandon woe in Primrose Hill.
© Leah Fritz published in Acumen
A madman lived across the street from me. I saw him only at night, his face dimly lit through slatted blinds. Three windows, one blackened and swollen by a rectangle controlling his breadth of air, faced mine. Across a square green room, bookcase-lined he paced.
I am a starer into space. Smoking and meditating (in the old-fashioned sense), I lay across my bed like a housebound dog. My eyes on the vague shapes of night in a city street, my ears inattentively absorbing sounds, I stared.
And so each night we met. For several years I watched him pace — ‘watched’ as I ‘heard’: trucks bumping over the familiar pothole, Saturday night drunks cursing their mates, distant screams — ‘watched’, then, minding my own business. For several years I watched. For several years he paced.
My interest mostly inward-turning, I wondered idly (wildly) if he was a prisoner in that square green room between those blinded windows and a darkened archway leading... elsewhere? The sun rising, the glass became opaque. Is madness just a night profession? Was he yet awake? Could it be his size, the massive shoulders, the great, sagging head, my own insomniac fancies which lent a strange expression?
Then one night, casually staring at my cigarette, watching it glow, behind closed windows — ‘Please don't look at me!’ — I saw his fist pressed against the pane. There were a hundred windows facing his. How many eyes, looking up from books, glance at the street? Was it my vacant stare he caught? Shaken, I sidled through the dimness, only my fingers visible, drawing the shades.
Then, any night I saw him there, he lifted one hand, silently — whether to wave or threaten I could not tell. Each time I turned, oddly frightened: Was it me, my oblong room, painted red, my treasured texts his vision leapt at, all my thoughts strewn across an unmade bed?
Or had we, neighbours in the stillborn night — he pacing, shaking his fist (or waving); I, passive and restless as a housebound dog trembling behind a half-drawn shade — at last vaulted the abyss, climbed the two stories of our lives, and broken into each other’s madness?
© Leah Fritz published in The Bow-Wow Shop
At this tail-end that might unwind a longer tale than I would care to tell, how vividly I see, under the microscope’s unfocused lens, the child I was and, viewed through sharper eyes, I still may be, wriggling on the slippery slide on which I’m caught, none the wiser in this, than that, lost century.
Born with, though not quite silver, nonetheless a spoon to overfeed my avid mouth — that I now find myself your specimen is no catastrophe perhaps, but I do feel a victim, and I mind my length of life, assiduously extended by right attitudes, has got me in this bind.
You find yourself impatient with my sentences which start out one way, turn around and start again most often in the middle; then, just when you think there’s no hope of an ending, suddenly do end — but some place in the middle, yet again. A dash will do, as in ‘I must’ — and dash I would, my friend,
if only... Slowly do I rise and slowly sit, and those who face a working day each morning sigh when offering their hard-won seats on buses to the likes of me. Embarrassed, I’d rather stand, but try as I might with smiles and all five feet of solid inner pride, it’s the outer me I can’t deny.
As if I am an actor made to play the part, and nature applied the putty and the grease-paint, I walk out on the stage, an extra in the scene, to no applause. Indeed, I feel I am a faint shadow in the backdrop, something that the artist tried unsuccessfully to hide, something too quaint
for the production that the playwright had in mind. And so is this alexandrine, a rhythm slow yet jogging quite irregularly, like the walk of one unsure of how or where she’s meant to go. Wherever, however, it’s not the way I’d choose. Odds on, I bet my life that I will get there, though.
© Leah Fritz in collection, Going, Going..., 2007, bluechrome.
Yippee! You remembered. So long ago, in ’68, the era of protest, madness — above all, love
which we interpreted as sex, being young and beautiful and free — not knowing how beautiful we were, how young.
Free — that part we couldn’t help but be. Youth has to live a little bit recklessly, and yet we survived, lived long
enough to look back now — how sweet of you to send that summer valentine, so out of season and so fine.
© Leah Fritz published in nth position |
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