Seven Things We Can’t Be Fucked About This Week — All These Fucking Frozen Moments

“Not giv’n a shite since 1976, so you don’t gotta be fucked about it.”

7. — Taking my seat on the 3:18 from London Waterloo-East to Tunbridge Wells and looking out the window as the train pulls out the station and seeing an elderly woman begging on the platform and for a moment considering what her life must have been like, what convolutions of the road led her to that pass, her childhood and obstacles that threw themselves in her way, the million things that might have influenced her for good or ill, with her tiny withered hand out and her eyes like opaque portholes. Fuck! Me brain splits in two.

6. — Passing by a shop window and catching out the corner of me eye a manikin with a enigmatic expression, and I don’t even turn to look at him full on, but he trails after me. Fuck! And I spend all day trying to reckon the significance of his look, I stare at me own self in the mirror and think what if I’d been born a showroom dummy, and sat up in a shop window forever watching the world go past?

5. — Kids playing kick the ball in the street down the block from me flat, who I pass by when I pop ‘round the shops, and the little waif stares me in the eye with her own big cavernous eye and it’s like I tumble into the big black iris of it, like it’s a dark tunnel into the center of reality, and there’s like an ancient wisdom in there, but something that can’t be expressed. Then when I walk back by with a paper bag full of milk and PG Tips and cream buns, she’s gone. Fuck! I spend the rest of the night staring out the window at the lamplit town and weeping silently to meself.

4. — She murmured something in the night, maybe she was talking to me, or maybe she was having a dream and she was talking to somebody in the dream. But I remember waking up, and seeing the streetlamp-cast shadow of the bureau on the wall, and the first light of what might have been dawn illuminating the window, in that in-between time when you’re not sure if it’s dawn or not, but there’s a subtle blue light filtering through, and I remember thinking that it might be important, what she’d said, but later on, when I woke up, I forgot what it was. Fuck! Years have passed, and now I can’t ask her.

3. — There was a night heron once, and as I crouched in my hide amongst the rushes at the creekside, I was drawn to his mournful cry, and when I located him he looked so lonesome in the green haze of the night vision goggles, standing in the rippling black shallows waiting for minnows to swim past, and all around us the reeling cosmos, a vast curtain of silver stars cascading over the edge of the world. Fuck!

2. — I saw a little potbelly pig who was friends with a dog, and they was nuzzling each other and lounging in a little basket together. Fuck! The look in that pig’s eyes, he looked like Buddha or something.

1. — Snowfall in the city, falling in long twinkling traces down past the streetlights, settling in soft and silent, covering the ground where everybody from the past now lies, hands clutched to bosoms and expressionless. Fuck!