A summer flu
‘Two days of horror’
was how I described it
to a friend,
who, it turned out,
had just the same
It wasn’t covid
I’d had that
a couple of weeks before
The two days of horror
was much worse
I couldn’t breathe too well,
and although
it was the hottest weekend
of the year
so far
I was shivering
A mate
sent me a photo
of her paddling pool
while I
dreamt
I was drowning
in choppy waters,
and above me
these huge gothic towers
loomed
and I thought
‘I’d like to paint this’
because I knew I was dreaming
I almost always do
and in moments of crisis
I always seem to think to myself
‘This would make good art’
or
‘I’m going to sample this’
as if
it were all just a film
instead of my life.
Being able to breathe
is pretty important,
and there was a point
where I considered maybe
I should call a taxi
to the hospital,
but in the end
I just called my mate instead
The week after that
was the forty degree
heatwave
The Leeds streets
were too much;
We sat in the shade
of the ridge
and listened to the trees creaking
I slept on sofas
most of that week
because I didn’t think
the damp in my flat
would do my lungs
any good
Like many things you encounter,
on the surface,
the flat was great
but the surface was all
A listed building
with
cracks in the floor
and crumbling ceilings
A TV in the bath
I never watch TV
Fuck that shit.
Anyway…
The next weekend was better,
except for the man
who spent
the entire five hours
me and my pals
were playing records
in a bar
trying to do our heads in
To be fair to him,
he succeeded.
He was maybe fifty,
and definitely
pissed off with life
Over-friendly banter
with snide undertones
slowly turning
to out and out rage
Of course
we got the rant about
‘Woke snowflakes’
Yeah yeah whatever mate
After he left,
and we did too
because it was closing time,
and he’d eaten all our set away
with his taking apart
of everything
he’d decided
we were,
I had a nice time
playing records
with my friend
But I also found out
that a man I used to work with –
someone I saw most days
for a year
was killed in an accident a few weeks before
and it kept popping into my head
the unfairness of it
and the horror
and the sadness
There has been a lot of horror and sadness
in the past few years;
Things that I would write about
if I even knew where to start