CONCRETE_OLYMPUS_

Today i met a wise man. I sat in the passenger seat of his pick up truck which had a name like an energy drink - my sorry silver tin can car strapped up on his trailer - and he told me about his work. He’d  recover people’s cars at any time, even with a sleeping child cosy at home. He prided himself on hearing his phone at 4am even on silent and going out to earn £100. It’s my hobby, he said. He owned the garage we were heading to. See I was a naughty kid, he said, his hands off the steering wheel to gesticulate quotation marks, before speaking about chances - the ones he was given and the ones he now gives.  Every time I thought to speak, it occurred to me that it was a question of why he did what he did, why he thinks how he thinks - and my questions felt like viruses infecting a healthy mind, so I left them unsaid.  This is perhaps a man Zeus made

the sirens tell you the world is out there beyond this silent kitchen with its tap dripping that rumble is cars, car radios, conversations  the wind carries other lives to the closed window each droplet a breath each leaning blade of grass a thought each one hitting a wall, an ear or falling to the ground

the lady with the large upper arms and legs like short stilts held out her phone on speaker and said  yea we had a catch up - an old deja vu down memory lane deja vu? I mouthed to the man behind her who carried on walking 

Dad went into the ward with my Guided by Voices  tee. Our very own jack flying over the cuckoo's nest. A bankruptcy and divorce led him to a car and a hose pipe, but it was the wrong kind of fuel, he said. I had bought that shirt with cash made from carving off bits of hash from my ounce - wandering through the surreal nighttime dusts of a summer festival with a teenage mind chewing acid. You have a singing voice like Don McLean said Mike, high on smack as I cut him off some pot.  Dad liked how it looked to be wearing the shirt in the asylum. The knowingness. Mad enough to be kept in, but sane enough to think he was in control of staying.

the neighbour with the window display of st georges flags and a ‘vote restore’ sign  has put a swing in his front garden to dry his pants

so it worked? she smiled back its  you? of course - and you - look at you! she manoeuvred his head to see each angle how do i look? younger - definitely because I was hideously old?  no - come on!  so what do you think? she curtsied  my hands - I hadn’t noticed how much my hands had changed the skin was milky and opaque I didn't know this you no - we were strangers well we ought to meet as strangers he held out his hand wow, madame, you’re beautiful, what’s your name? she snorted  no!  what? wouldn’t that have worked? she danced in front of him god - I hadn’t noticed how tired i was. let’s dance! whose energy do we have? who cares - so what if our time runs out and we return to two dead old bodies he smiled and started dancing from his head downwards at least we will have had this - now dance with me!

the sky is a yellow milk a lost post bag dragged through the dirt summers ending fuck - did I make enough of this one ?

S designed houses - housing estates in fact. He liked the principles of Le Corbusier and built shopping centres and tower blocks out of raw concrete. It wasn’t long before his buildings lay sick and abandoned and he became obsessed with dereliction. He lost hours in empty rooms with broken windows. He didn’t believe in the paranormal but he felt the life and death of a place at the same time. Standing in the shopping centre he’d designed many years ago, he could feel the energy of the hundreds of lives that passed through and felt their absence like an emptiness in himself. S became a grandfather and he entered his third life of playgrounds. His first had been as a child jumping off swings onto concrete. His second was as a dad terrified his sons would do the same. His third was as a grandad and he knew this would be the last spoonful of this meal. He admired the climbing frame. This tiny metal temple gate in flood water, snow and the dust of summer.  And so S spent the remainder o...

do you still draw? no. how come? i’m not sure. as a boy it used to be like eating. i wish i remember what the drawings were for.  what they were for- i watched my son draw and he either showed me the page afterwards or he just threw it aside and started another one.  you feel one was for you and the other for- for himself, for nothing, for itself? do you still draw?  yes.  do you draw from compulsion still? yes i suppose i maintained the practice of drawing. not always for the same reasons though. increasingly they’re like notes for me.  and who are the notes for? for me i think mainly and ideas for work. do they look much different - the drawings for you and the ideas for work? probably. i’m not always convinced i have a popular taste but I can sometimes recognise what might be popular. you might draw yourself an apple and then a pear that people might like. yes. or i usually draw something and decide if I like it. if I decide i like it I...

give me the sound of a school playground on the air that fenced in joy please play me it on loop

if death isn’t just nothingness then i feel it might be like this  an endless wet sandy beach and the dim rattle of far off waves the sky blocked by clouds that sag grey in the air  and a wind that plugs the ears and loudens the mind  i stop and you walk on barefoot and carefree as I look for you in the distance  i saw you as a memory i’ll have i can see your smile from here  you said you talked to your body coaching it to fight the cancer you saw the sea as limitlessness an open expanse of opportunity this place gave you hope and your voice a clarity i felt a stranger in it in this space where our privacy wanders through an air of stem cells the air we breathe in dreams  walking always at a distance a guest still wearing his shoes