Found a friend down by the way today my mum she asks how
school went so I tell her how we met how I scraped my knee scrambling with the
other boys from the neighbourhood playing war games in the cool of the disused
quarry always last slowest in the class clumsy too there was a ditch that the
other boys flew over but I fell down from the mound to the stone to the ground
to the grit that slit me so; I still bare and bear the scar; the skin tore the
blood pumped through tattered flesh to the gravel watched it travel like a
river the red slithering through the tar and the cracks in the concrete to the
sleet grey of her knackered shoe the sole so worn that her feet were coming
through she slowed her stride and came to my side she a few months older than I
said it was okay that I cried when the shock wore off when I was in such pain
it felt like the clocks had stopped seconds turning to centuries but she took
the rag from her head the blue rag that kept the blonde curls taut and off her
brow the way her mother taught her to but the blue flew from her forehead to
the tears on my flesh and her hair came down to the black and the brown of her
eye in straw coloured corkscrews; she made a joke you know, she tried to make
me laugh and she did and her rag hid the cut well enough a cuff of kitchen
cloth across my leg and we talked about stuff and I played the fool and by some
miracle she thought I was cool and tomorrow we’re going to play some more at
school.
How long is this going to go on for?
Lost a friend today at a house party drugs and drink and the
Kinks flowing from speakers sinking into the carpet on collapsing shelves
knocked too many times my drunken teenagers talking about themselves and she’s
over there wearing the pearls that he brought for her for Christmas relaying
lines from sitcoms so badly it makes my stomach stir the room is whirring the
frontmen are singing there’s a stinging ring on my hand as amber ash falls from
a Pal Mal held by the girl with legs for days and a clapped out motor mouth that
sounds like it could and would rattle on for millennia telling me that I’m a
good listener because I’m too stunned by the stupidity of the girl that isn’t
her the girl who nursed my knee the girl who sees nothing wrong with what she’s
doing to me her eyes hidden by the twists of tinted gold being pawed away by
her boyfriend’s prying claws to care about what she’s sharing but the girl
isn’t staring back at me so as I see her boyfriend close I shut the other girl
up lock her lips with my lips lock her breast to my chest she pushes me back
onto the sofa in the room that no one’s in anymore where they store their bikes
and bric-a-brac and those who lack the friend they wanted to spend the rest of
their days with kicks off her shoes continues her attack there’s a chunk of
vibrating plastic lodged in my back a text a tweet a fleet of updates and a few
words from the girl in corkscrews and pearls whose dress unfurls to reveal to
the pretender passion her breasts that she’ll see me tomorrow and I wonder,
semi hidden in the girl, when it will all end.
How long is this going to go on for?
Lost a friend on the way wrong exit both ends time bends us
apart when we speak these days we never go beyond the start never get down to
the deep to the finish conversation has all but diminished nations apart in
thought conversation cut short repeatedly nothing to say nothing new to do the
same old haunts the same old crew the same old spot where the hot of freshly spat
chewing gum glues to the soles of our shoes floods the treads of our tattered
trainers. We’ve been to uni we barely spoke the meeting’s a joke to be honest
so silent together in the midst of Mayfair clientele quieter than the furniture
that we continue to concur on about this and that at least these old beasts of
wood and leather squeak openly and honestly and have the courtesy to squeak
freely among themselves not caring about what the tables and the shelves think.
It’s gotten to the stage where even blinking is cautious, followed by farces about
late nights that make me feel nauseous. This meeting feels stained by an
estranged restraint we don’t know each other well enough anymore to complain or
contradict or to dig beyond the surface how are you how is the course how is
the city we don’t dare force the focus to something more poignant and personal
but we do force the surface for all it’s worth bad quips fake mirth bitching
about peers and personnel.
How long is this going to go on for?
Lost among old friends tending to the wounds of a relationship
winding down amidst the sounds of song and beer swilling bravados belting out
songs from a top 20 from 20 years ago. We’re older, and this is still going on
the stale of conversation carried forward four jobs later how are you how’s the
job how’s the wife how’s the husband how’s the house how’s the kid never
anything real, never how’s your life, never a real answer just a series of
fines and synonyms for fine intertwining for the twenty minutes we see each
other over lunch over coffee and cigarettes formerly now over decaf and Nicorettes
we’re watching our cholesterol so the food’s very droll and tastes of nothing
pseudo bacon cut from fresh tofu vein-less lifeless and grey on a chipped but
chip-less blue plate staying for food is the biggest mistake we make because we
can’t shake the feeling that we’re friends only by label and memory but
strangers for eternity and the placemats on the table remind me of the rag
against me knee and those days for it all to seem like a fable but I’m not able
to get beyond that label to fact but I have to act like everything’s cool and
like we’re good friends like we were in primary school.
How long is this going to go on for?
Found a friend in the soundless ground today time ticks by
second by second cells rolling from the skin to the soft inside of her box in
the ground where she dwells where she hides and at a eulogy I tell her friends
and her family what they want to hear I tell them we were lifelong friends and
that even in death our friendship won’t end and that my only regret is that I
wasn’t nearer to her and some of what I say is true under the blue of a Barnet
sky in the green of a cemetery of sorts at the worn brown of a bending lectern
that’s been out in the rain too many times behind the black of my suit my body
quakes in confusion a young man an old man a man waiting to be sprung from the
speech by the preacher I wish I had been nearer I wish she was dearer to me
than she was because wouldn’t it be nice to mean what I said wouldn’t it be
nice to be able to say that friendships never end and that sending a body to
the bottom of a mound of brown means nothing because they’re still a friend
when in fact the end came long before they stopped breathing and in fact I’ve
done my grieving for years through all those warm beers in those boring bars all
those double dates that we both hated all those slates that were never cleaned
all those words that never did mean a thing all those minutes all those moments;
nothing, nothing more than the sting of that ashen ring nothing more than the
day when we were small when she played queen and I played king; nothing more
than tattered pictures in a chest of a child’s play things, nothing but stains
on paper among innocent remains, gathering dust; nothing but.
