an old favourite.

Black and white. Shades of grey. Wooden carvings .Blue and chlorinated. Blue of the gass heating up my milo. There isn’t a microwave here. Red of the blood oaths I would have taken with friends I could have made. If only there were no AIDS or Rebt’s or alcohol or jobs. Lost jobs. Found drinks. Black nights. I shiver so uncontrollably my teeth chatter and it drowns out the sound of drips in a tin sink, of two men sleeping back to back upstairs, of resistance, of the strain of taking one more heavy breath. In and out. Chest heaves up and down. Lungs are weighty, filled with poison. Poison from a bottle a weedy man sells us on the way here. Posion from bottles we used to keep in the cellar. There is no cellar here so they’re stacked by dad’s bed. It’s irrelevant, it’s fictional. It’s romantic irony. It doesn’t matter now. It’s just up and down, in and out, until you’ve had so much to drink that the brain doesn’t send the "breathe" signal to the lungs anymore. Until then, heavy lungs heave.