Somewhere near Palafrugell

You tend my hair
two grey's the count
An attention to the
composition of my eyelash
A catalogue of spots,
rogue bristles, sly,
defiant. Removed,
popped, denuded.
Maladies and rages
coruscating rash,
darkly mottled types
witnessed on the sheets,
vigil and signals
read, thoughts derived.
my my love how
much I am watched,
deep and contented,
visionary

At a kiosko in La Boqueria

There's so much more to this life - café
and butchers on every corner of a
high proud fruit-filled place.
I'm struck by the concentration -
of smells, of people, of jittery
rapid Spanish and men eating
mushrooms and newspaper.
I romanticise everything about
Europe because I've been told to,
I expect it of myself - one of
many greats. It's a self-assembly
day to day.

Bus to Barcelona

We pass weird squat towns
tall and crowded into valleys
everything looks deserted,
post-arcadian industrial ruin.
Underneath it all a rural-ghost
farm, littered with old stone
monasteries thrust under
the factories.
dirty Paso dobles - accusing pastel
heads doting the hills
then suddenly coke and nets
pine after pine into advertising
stock and taller barrios,
sleek architectural arguments
made in concrete and red light
another gherkin.mosaic
now coliseum doric grandeur
vistas nobler, higher still
filled with wire awning breath
and Gaudi's heights

Play with me

Ash. Smoke. Black.

Tony; middle-aged, wry, academic.

TONY: I’m not here to tell you what happened. You can see it for yourselves. The aftermath. I’m not here to clean out. To sift or sort through. I’m here to tell you what was lost. And what was found.
Let me show you;

A change. Clear light.

It’s 1988. The sun is shining. Somewhere a boy in sandals and blue socks plays cricket with his brother. Elsewhere people are getting ready to celebrate the Bicentenary. 200 years of settlement - white colonisation... I’m at my father’s house - sitting on his bleached white furniture, picking at the paint, staring at the yard. Tough grass out there. Good for rumbles, good for bull-rush. An apple tree teeters in the corner, its fruit more the neighbour’s than our own. His shed - long locked up - next to it. Never go in the shed. Not anymore. He’s about to tell me a story.

A man emerges; Older, greying, yellowed.

GEVARD: You want? (Offers him a Date) Its good. No? Hm, more for me.

TONY: My father. Lowering himself creaking into a chair. The stripped pattern fabric fading on our back verandah. Must have gotten 40 years of sun by now. Nearly as much as me. He offers me another date. No, thanks. I take a cup of coffee from him - there’s filigree gold on the rim, you don’t see glasses like that much anymore, not round here. It’s a long time till I see them again. He clears his throat.

A cough

And begins;

This time round...

I’m 24 when they take my testicle. The right one. Just a day surgery really. A small scar buried in tangled hair. The end always unhealed - the only thing to let you know. I had two once. I think I can remember what that was like – I have a sensation that I associate with having two. But I’m not sure. You can’t tell you say. It’s like you never knew before – when there was more. But I can sometimes; it swings lower now, freer, scared. Everything – every rash, every lump, every jitter could be – it. Back back again. That’s no way to live.