Kill Zone.

Laughter KILLS hate. 

Love KILLS pain. 


Life KILLS Death... 

'Being Here...'

I'm definitely a dreamer. 

I know that's a pathetic thing to be...this was plastered all over my school reports as a kid.

'Dreamer'.

'Clown.'

'Traitor'.


My school reports home...

The scarlet letters of my sins and iniquities...

& the attendant punishment...for my profound laziness, my dreamy wonder at the world outside...

My dissidence.

My flaws and failings...

Recorded for posterity, in all likelihood sitting in a scrap book somewhere at home...

kept by my mother, who still wonders...


What is he doing??

What the hell is he doing???


Who the hell can say.


So I know, you don't have to tell me.

I'm a dreamer for life.

&

God slaughters dreamers like unwanted dogs. 


And yet...

Here I am in Halifax. 

(I never felt quite right in Truro; it was like Interzone.

I couldn't quite make it work for me.)


I can make Halifax work for me.

I know it. 

I can feel it!!!


I can function here.


This place had literary overtones;

which is perfect for me. 


Soon as I checked into my room,

I still full of energy...

So I went for a walk along Old Garden Street. 


First thing I noticed was the watchful eyes of Hakim Optical...

Just like those glasses...watching over the narrator in 'Great Gatsby'.  (a novel I don't much care for, from a writer I care for even less, incidentally.)


But I felt those eyes.

Watching me.


I felt a little paranoid...

just like I felt about the watchful glasses in 'Gatsby'.

But they could just as easily be the watchful eyes of the kindly Gods. 

It's all just a matter of how you look at it. 


Feeling all literary...

I found myself a bookshop café.

  
I browsed awhile, and made a choice.

 

 

I bought a cup of coffee, and leafed through my nice clean hardcover copy of 'Being There'.

NOT a first edition...

But in the first few runs.

Probably fourth or fifth.


Kosinski was a mad man; he murdered himself in cold blood.

Like so many other of my favourite writers.


I don't dwell on these poor, wretched, beautiful bastards.

Brautigan springs to mind as one such troubled soul.

Right.

It doesn't do to celebrate their deaths.

But it's OK to sing their lives.


& it's OK to sing mine.


So here I sit...

Full of energy,

Full of the life force...


Replenished in mind, body and spirit.


'What is he doing???'


If you have to ask...

You will never understand.  


There is a guy sitting opposite me now, in the literary café...

& he is a dead ringer for Mishima.


I think he understands.


If I asked him?


You know...


I think he would know what I'm doing.



It's enough...


for today.