*Hey Garland, I dig your Tweed coat*
A collaboration with John Travis
'Hey Garland, I dig your harris tweed coat,' said the man in the bar, coughing and spluttering under the fan which decapitated large insects.
'Last time. My name is NOT Garland and this is NOT a tweed coat.' Half a daddy-longlegs fell in his beer. 'My name is Alan.'
Alan looked around for hope of rescue. In one corner someone had bent a promotional cardboard man in two, his unpainted brown back facing him in a bow. The jukebox rumbled like a broken combine harvester, the lights skidded off the lenses of his greasy spectacles and swallowed a cockroach chewing a beermat. He'd had enough he decided.
Out on the street cars moved too quickly for his liking. He looked at a black sleeve. How could anyone think it was TWEED?
'Excuse me,' said a voice as thick as the pub it had just come from. 'Mr.Garland? That fellow you were talking to said you left these behind.'
He turned round to look and saw a man in what looked like a tweed overcoat vanish back into the murk. Looking at his feet Alan saw a small leather book covered in flowers. A GARLAND. Opening the book he saw it was full of sonnets. TWO GARLANDS. 'My name is not Garland!' he yelled at the train passing on the bridge to his right. Nobody answered him.
The rain that fell was doing its best to avoid him, but he knew he'd better go to a cafe before he was accosted again. One loomed up in the distance, its plastic sign swinging and chopping before the entrance like a windmill propeller with vertigo, stubbornly avoiding altitude. Waiting for the sign to swing away he ducked within.
The geese inside did have long necks but no feathers. They were loose-limbed lovelies. The café was a nice one. Smiles all round. He found the sonnet book again within his inside his black jacket. HE looked at his own image in her steamed-up mirror and decided he was at his best seen thus.
“Give you a fiver for that,” said Stewart, nose-pointing Alan’s book.
“Do I know you?” asked Alan. Stewart nodded and tugged a crisp not from a wad he’d already wagged about rather ostentatiously. “Is it valuable, then?” continued Alan, almost to himself.
“Anything by Garland is worth a sandstorm.” Stewart, by now, was toasting the whole company with a mug of brew which the café-owner had swirled upon a bright-red poker device.
Alan knew a sandstorm was local parlance for a gold-dust. Pouches of it he had lately been humped at the dockside by whistling stevedores. Alan had watched, wondering if trust was a bankable commodity.
There was a black market in soot, too--those swags of radiation cinders the syphoning of which was good at summoning beautiful heroines from longnecked floosies. And the residues were even better than a summerful of swallows. And the best sonnet was a nature one, containing dense textural affinities with Tommaso Landolfi.
Alan gulped, in honest miming of Stewart’s own gargling. The whole company laughed. He had been accepted. The pub was just another nightmare. They all wanted a share of the sonnets. A strangely intellectual crowd who knew it was Poetry Day.
Despite the interest provoked by the book, nobody touched it. They took to him well enough, and seemed to know the book's contents off by heart. When he looked up, the cafe owner was smiling at him and the book. 'So then,' he said. 'I had my doubts but they were right, after all. The flowers--' he indicated the prunish buds along his shoulders. 'Nice touch.'
Alan was tired. He didn't want to play poetry any more, his brain was full of it - he'd be dreaming black polonecks for a week. It was like something from another age, not real people at all. Home was the place, he decided.
'YOU brought IT?' the cafe owner asked sweeping flies from sticky buns encased in plastic containers. 'Or Vice-versa?'
'It was given to me by an idiot,' Alan replied trying to ignore a sugar cube seemingly marching across the table. 'Nothing to do with me...'
Outside, taxis lined the pavement like sleeping dogs. Living dogs sniffed at them to see if they recognised the scent, then moved away.
'Home.' he said to the driver as he climbed into the first in the queue.
'And where might that be?' the driver said, his expressions changing from one of annoyance to knowing generosity. 'Ah...' he nodded. 'No problem, Gar. An honour in fact.'
Moving alongside the black river he couldn't remember if he'd told the driver where he lived. But he seemed to be going in the right direction. Passing an empty phone box, a line of one of the poems stuck in his head;
"You've no idea how good it is to be here,
said the man who wasn’t there at all.”
Alan smiled. Thankfully he'd left that damned book in the cafe.
But the driver knew differently; still, he was in a generous mood; he'd only charge the one of them.
Soon, the driver forgot whom he was driving to where and even whether he was driving at all. As for Alan, he felt himself living in a poem; well, at least, travelling the right distance to see everything around him as poetic. The tower blocks were wreathed in living moonlight. The distant river a silver eel, writhing. A crowd of golden clouds crowned the zenith of the towering taxi roof that seemed to stretch upward like a brick-built bubble of gum; gliding like a Tower of Babel on wheels, garlanded with swirling beach-storms around each of its pinnacles.
The pub and café were nearby on their own respective sets of wheels, twirling, waltzing, to the rhythm of the words. Alan shut his eyes for a moment to see if he could believe them. Darkness was sown with its own floaters oozing like earwigs from each optic fuse. He opened them again and a shaft of iritic light blasted scars into the back of the brain’s beyond. The book paid the fare as the taxi went off into a blood-yolk sunset. Alan traipsed after the creaking dust-covered boards of the book’s striding, its pages fluttering between them--hanging like genital leaves from the gold-tooled spine. A blood orange reflection in the skyscraper café’s west window blinded Alan for the second time, whilst the London Eye (once the pub) revolved ferrisly, furiously for the start of the next poem.
This one was far more down to earth, as Alan was up-ended at his own back door. His wife was at the window waving what looked like an Hawaiian necklace of flowers. A poem made flesh. Her shape was tattooed on his brain as well as the branded flesh itself wet-flannelling his brain with a pink-cream essence. He loved her for her words.
But there was the book. Alan saw it standing before the door flapping its pages and rustling its cover like so many cardboard peacocks eager to get between the shelves. The door opened and the pen (all seventy-two inches of it) removed its plastic head and squealed. Alan thought about the poem he'd had imprisoned in his head earlier.
There was something wrong here, he decided.
He watched as the giant pen scribbled itself all over the gigantic book like a rash of nettles in that brightly-lit hallway, the wallpapered ducks intent on hari-kiri, dive-bombing the skirting board.
He didn't know these two at all.
'You've had me on the tranquilisers again,' said the pen, fastening her head back on as they went inside.
'There was a man murdered in that pub tonight. I don't know why you go.' Alan didn't hear the reply, although the pen laughed. 'That coat needs a wash. You'd have been better with a leather one.'
Alan watched as the door closed and the lights went out. He could imagine the correcting fluid had been carefully applied as he stood there on the pavement.
Moving away he climbed into a cab just as the driver got out. And Alan knew from the look on the man's face that the notion he'd been entertaining for the past minute or so was true.
"You've no idea how TERRIBLE it is to be here,
said the man who wasn't there at all."
That's how the poem SHOULD'VE read.
Leaving the cab and filled with a nostalgic tang of sadness-on-sea, Alan Gogol headed back around the ringway via London Land's derriere towards its eye to look for his rigid, gas-filled corpse, ostensibly to get the leather jacket which would provide scant protection against his feeble shivering. Snowstorms are just ghosts of sand ones, he thought. That’s how your poem COULD’VE read, said his wife. Once it had cleared its eyes of earwigs, of course.
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