Well. He certainly liked his walks.
I’m sorry if that makes him sound like a dog
but it’s true.
Anyway. What can I say?
He took a lot of pictures.
There. A positive.
Shared them on Twitter. He Tweeted.
Was a Twitterer.
Between you and me
I don’t see much difference
between that and those crazy people you see over the park
hunched over with a bag of crusts, covered in pigeons.
Still, it gave him a sense of purpose.
To be honest, and this doesn’t go any further,
I think it’s a crying shame.
All those plans he had, all those Big Ideas.
And in the end, what did it come down to?
A scattering of snaps on some virtual table.
Each one with a cutesy title, of course,
for ease of identification, I suppose,
like those tags you see
tied on toes in the mortuary.
I mean, honestly:
sticks & stones
the rag tree
coppice storm
guardian of the way
you take my point
(That last one’s me, btw, rofl).
I mean – look at this one:
a shovel, broken in the handle
dropped in the woods.
‘Like it died and hadn’t been able to bury itself’
That’s what he told me. I said Okay Right Hmm
But isn’t that just a teensy bit morbid?
He was like that, though.
A bit dry for some.
He couldn’t just close his eyes
and feel the sun on his face.
D’you know what I mean?
He had to root around in all that shadowy shit
Bring things down
to the flare of light in a horse’s eye
or the dance of a rag tied on the lowest branch of a tree.
Or, for heaven’s sake,
a broken shovel someone tossed.
I mean, honestly.
Where’s the joy? The simple common sense?
It just goes to show,
you can lead a horse to water
but you can’t make it stop banging on
about words, art, life
and the difficulty thereof