Coffee

Sitting in an environment I know and, for all that it lacks, love. Comforted by the warmth of pungent coffee and cigarettes, wrapped in a blanket of the warmth that is made all the more overpowering by the cold which it keeps at bay, piled around the house, increasing the air pressure within. A fresh new tin of weighty gas will soon sort that out - so eager to escape the canister that it eats up the walls in sheets of flame as soon as it is released. Life is a constant battle to temper one evil with another, and so I sink down and fight off depression with coffee, cigarettes & a computer screen. The old writer found solace in his words. Throughout his long years, they had been the only friend who hadn't betrayed him. True, they had kept things hidden for many years, but he did not hold this against them, as it was always such a delight to find what they had been concealing for so long. And so he remained, in his disused railway carriage, with his cat and his typewriter, watching the follies of the human race. And so where was he when he reached the end of words? When the only friends to whom he had given anything of himself, to whom he had unburdened all of his deepest, darkest secrets, abandoned him. He was sickened with the anger of self-disgust, identifying in himself all of the sins which he had projected upon those innocent ink-marks on paper, and which they had then turned against him. Weakened by the malignancies stolen from him, he burned up in his anger like a sheet of translucently thin type-writer paper, until all that was left was the blackened ashes, fluttering like death's-head moths in the thermal current of the gas heater. The cat knew better than to wait around - he made his own way, self-reliant as ever. A blacker type of moonlight has overcome me, lacking the energising edge of a chill darkness. Seven tides cast adrift in a sarcophagus on the Sargasso Sea, six months and still you've heard nothing from me. Walking through a city street, human bodies adrift, washed in the pale deathly grey of the new moon, which burns cold even throughout the day. Grey cracks pave the area beneath my feet. Plate-glass windows form a vertical pavement. I try to recall the memory of you, but see only interference, clouding my vision and my emotional responses to others. Events pass me on Note: Yeah, miserable again - I'm not usually like this, honest! Once more, it was as a result of Gill's extended stay in India. Apologies to William Burroughs for the rip-off.