My well planned salvation

Consorting They shot one boy, tough with need a bloody hole clear through his hopes.

From the train, factories and foundries rusted angles, raw paths I know well. Clouds sprawl across the sky stimulating my stalled imagination my past giving off an ashen light. No more lying curled and still waiting for the slamming of heavy doors. I shall pay attention, feed my brain so death will not gain on me as I read my way into the future. When I look up from turning pages I want to see women with hair shining in a town lazy like any other wild with the taste of air and rain or sunlight catching children's bicycles scenes to keep life from getting out of hand.

Cool scents through an open window at night exhausted blood returning to my heart a new leaf turned by the breeze as I read my escape, my salvation, well planned.

No relief All along the cell-block said the shyster to the thief. The singing echoes like a threat voice flatter than Bob Dylan's loaded with false jocularity disturbing his reverie in colour of high A-list dealing days. Fuckfuckfuck he whispers his sweat sour in the grey slot the months ahead impossible.

His strained reflection in stainless he recalls erratic schooldays the burgeoning differential between brainpower and behaviour his father's pet comment re. fees. Like flushing cash down the toilet. Add, he mutters to swirling water more money than you dreamed of plus The Brat of the Bar's career. There must be some way out of here.

Protected witness They grew silent in the rain after I found him as if clues were an embarrassment. Gulls cast shadows over the man or what he had become, all memory gone foetal-shaped near the cannery lying next to a length of sodden rope curled, soot or ash or blood-soaked an S, a warning, a signature? He must have run my route for fitness downriver, towards the estuary away from the mini-golf and motels instead of running, like me, for survival. Like me, he wore cheap running shoes his beard neatly trimmed like mine the same arm tattooed, a faded eagle our eyes that shade of staring blue. The plainclothes goons exchanged looks the paramedics, too, but not with me. I have to find a different route. The postcards I can't send my children are black with tiny words of loneliness.