It's all spoken-shouted-slurred, in that way, and said in the sad, hollowed-out button eyes on every corner from Argyle Street to the Trongate to the Gallowgate, a direction of travel, a well-worn circuit. The grey lost look of forgetting how to care about anything other than the next rush, the next hit. They are, for real, the literal ghosts of glass, firmly in the shadows, dressed as permanent skeletons, and they were once as proud and strong and determined as you and me. You witness them as twosomes, mostly, around this town, a boy and a girl, arguing about everything and nothing, on a marching route to somewhere better. Let's call them Mary and Tommy. And they could be any age between twenty-one and fifty-three, you just couldn't say for sure. Hair scraped back and a cigarette behind the left ear. Fake, engorged, gold earrings and a De Niro pitbull called 'Rab' scanning for fear and trouble. All you know is to cross the street, to avoid them, to avoid having to face what you might have been, what you still could be. In being so utterly lost to addiction, it's true, there is a focus that drives the movement forwards, to the next mission, but you just never know - an eye could meet an eye in a random second and they could stop at you, to set about you, for a light, for loose change, for some kind of hopeful amnesty from this pain called time and misery and a need to just be fucking heard, to know this is existence. But you just never know, you can never tell. So you cross the motorcycle streets, staring at the pavements made of discarded chewing gum, listening to that old song that tells you to not be so hard on yourself. Heroin, seriously, just fuck-you. And fuck-you well and good and true. You kill this place and the people that could have made it. So, just fuck you.
-
Flowered Up - 'Dark side of the spoon' (4.19)
-
Remembering Liam Maher: born July 17, 1968 - died October 20, 2009. He was just 41 years of age.
-
No comments:
Post a Comment