Don Juan
D: “How does it feel?”
Me: “How does what feel?”
D: “To be without a home?”
Me: “Mm. Not bad, actually.”
D: “Like a complete unknown?”
Me: “S’alright. Not that bothered really.”
D: “Like a rolling stone?”
Me: “Ah, but it’s only like a rolling stone, isn’t it, it’s not actually being one.”
I am not going to stand here and tell you that, OMG!, somebody should write a play about me and my friends, it’d be just like Sam Shepard’s A Short Life of Trouble or, failing that, Coronation Street, because they shouldn’t and it wouldn’t. Yet you take your poetry where you find it, and my ear seems neatly tuned to the FM all-nite wavelength of despair. People around me might discourse daily in Wildean epigrams and blank verse for all I’d (probably) notice, but it is only the sad, banal, curtain-calling lines from a Beckett play which I remember when I hear them, when someone sighs on a night drive home and says “So dark. So early.” or “It’s a long way back from here.”
Then there’s the poetry of things. The worst pub I have ever been to is a place in Longtown called The Bush. It is so bad that there is no way of describing it without cliché, from the peeling wallpaper yellowed with Woodbines and age, the broken light-bulbed latrine, the mangy dog which barks you in the door, the grizzled locals listening with suspicion to your Scots accent, the surly landlady who bangs your tea-coloured beer down in front of you… It is all awful, and it is all right, authentic, of a piece. It is true in a sense that most things and places -and people- never are. Your humble narrator included.