henrybrook.com

there is violence…crazies rushing in from the dark. London doesn’t need me,

but I need London.

to say goodbye to a friend. And a nod to the sea, been landlocked since I was out with the whales a half year gone.

in the night tunnel. Two of us alone in the city, dark house avenues and the magnolias unbuttoning, the stage is ours.

the approaches. I only spot him as I turn. The world scrutinized by hidden furballs and other sentients, the ones I don’t discover, lurking deeper in the ferns.

and lost keys, doors painted shut. I have a camera drone, could survey the locked quads and rose walkways of the town, a tableau vivant of dons and studes at two meg res. But I prefer the not-knowing.

around the tables of syrupy lager pints, samizdat fanzines, SWP flyers, gig posters and roll ups. My glistening ten-pack of Benson placed carefully at the card table, to see me through to the bell and the shouts, the lurch back to bedsit or villa lounge room crash pad with its Nakamichi tape deck, unwashed tea mugs and a two bar fire. Smoke and shiny faces in the pub, a crowd five deep along the bar. Outside it was recession and strike, faraway nukes and CND marches, no money for a landline and four channels on the box. But it was buzzing in the rooms with beer-sticky swirled carpets and smoked glass partitions, we had reason enough to celebrate, we were in here and not out there.

about things that haven’t happened. Let’s not say someone said this about something somebody might do. Commentariat spooked by our digital now but the guess ahead is tainted with bias, breathless propaganda.

of the abandoned build, snowdrops through the wire fence. There are too many houses standing empty here. I’m out in the street, polishing the headlights on the wagon, trying to get it through one more test. One more year on the road. I don’t mind cleaning the lights for an hour. I don’t care that the money’s no good. I’ve no interest in cars, I just want to keep this one alive and rolling so it doesn’t join the great human scrap pile, the K2 of trash we spew out with each sun turn, the SPAM can down at the approach to the Mariana trench. And I don’t want to think about finding another car, I don’t get it with cars as sexy, cars as something I should want. I want what I already have.

these days, I don’t think they even know they’re doing it. Whispers, future shocks and blog rants presented as truths. It’s easy to bash the shaman, harder to reach the entranced. And closer to home, coming up for eight months since the vote and where’s the reform? The vote is the reform. The bosses and the observers can’t think of an answer. It’s the disconnect between all the spouting and the shift of hope in the abandoned people that I fear most.

you with your can of pils, nine in the morning, riding the train. Pudgy, beaten, rounded face. You with the laptop and the shirt that hugs every curve, you wittering and grouching, you with the sad, tailspin eyes. Do you see me? Do you hear me thinking. Am I coming through? And when it’s my turn to pack up and leave, why do I find myself stuck out here alone on the utility-grey fake cobbles, these zincland pylon vistas? Journey-ruffled and dislocated, my bike takes me home.