1
Lower Basin Street, 17.05.02
‘The apartment blocks were stubby, tobacco-stained fingers. There was this kid
in the drizzle hurling. I heard him before I saw him, the sliothar’s hollow thwack
echoing through the empty yard. There was just shit everywhere man; empties,
what might have been syringes, a rusting upturned bicycle. I mean it wasn’t
raining like it does in Florida but it was coming down pretty heavy and, dude,
I’m telling you this guy was wearing nothing, just jeans and some kind of T-
shirt. He was, like, thirteen or fourteen I guess. There was something almost
attractive in the way his body flicked and twisted, in his canine scrawniness. His
skin was like a shower curtain, beaded with water and almost see-through. It
was one of those moments, Kelly… I could have… He was still there, taking aim,
I kid you not, over and over again at a sodden election poster. The buildings’
shadows… I really felt something.’
2
Gruel, 17.05.02
A joke archive, a grainy video about somebody’s father,
dresses that were commissioned by BT2,
photographic self-portraits by a big-titted Swede,
brown envelopes that held nothing but an IOU,
and our young adulthood in their many colours (but mainly black): ‘I just adore
Caoimhe’s new stuff’ … ‘my third opening this week’ … ‘sort of; the critic as host’ …
I sipped raw, salty wine, dreading the mention of insurance
or house prices, of Friends or the word ‘post’,
and thought of the spilt milk and the money spent,
our wastefulness, of all the possibilities we were sure to miss
and of course did. (Will someone mention the fucking election?)
We might have been otherwise. We were and are like this.
I raised my glass to Dame Street beyond the window,
to the clog of fine diners scuttling through the rain, of wealth
and German engineering. ‘Of course he still does the death thing’
. . . ‘absolutely locked’ … ‘I mean what’s critique anyway ?’ … Your health.