J Slinger

He spoke with haste and obscurity. Phrases cut and pasted onto a blinking screen like a business school bill burroughs.  I know these words but find no meaning in their phrasing - just a hollow row of letters executing a fraction of a second.  This man demonstrates an educational and professional lineage that can only communicate with its own. I take more from quiet, from broken speech with sleepy umms. Sentences that finish half way. Words that take a moment because their shared understanding is intimate. I think we said goodbye if  we even said hello.

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