The jokers gathered for a few laughs smoking in Farmworth
Park and then scattered while the sun was still high enough to navigate them to
far-flung districts, like spiders legs from a central collective, to commit
their separate capers, intoxicated on weeds, and latterly settle tired into
sleeping bags. They came together like this and then separated on a daily
basis, smoking themselves into an indistinct adventure that was becoming
tiresome and the laughs fewer and fewer. Still they came until the giggles
dried up entirely and all they were left to do was smoke and stare at each
other and just think themselves into smaller and smaller spaces, then leave
straight for their bedsits where they’d forget to eat and brush their teeth and
squirm in their minds, thinking, smoking in isolation, until thinking was all
they did, in streams, then loops and knots, then nooses. They no longer met and
only long ago, forgotten now, remembered that they were the jokers, their
coloured suits frayed, tattered, torn, and were now the taunted bums, the
scraggly men and girls who wandered and mumbled but never spoke, wittered into
windows, peered into open spaces, seldom left their bedsits. Secretly, intrepid
and daunted into a paranoia they crept along, sightless to life’s object,
cursed as they were into the delusions of their minds, to walk streets more
furtive, tormented, to wither in shadows, and, in time, go unseen, unknown, and
to all purposes disappear into that haunted presence known only to themselves;
to smoke through, their salvaged haze of existence, the comfort of the
familiar, scraggly, in never-replaced shoes, unwashed, beards to their toes,
teeth sacrificed to the laws of neglected physiology, stooped and crippled they
hobbled, sticks with sticks, broken men, taunted by a world of their own
miscreation, smoking themselves to smoke, blown distantly and forgotten.
Kelvin Hellman sat in his room pondering all this and more
besides, much more, smoking his third, or fourth, hopefully last of the evening,
but who knew. Kelvin could only hope that after this one his fingers stopped
doing it and he could sleep.
Kelvin Hellmen turned 26. He’d been smoking since 14 and
continued smoking straight through the birthdays like they weren’t there and he
wasn’t growing up at all, just disappearing. Weren’t we all? And he was right,
his perspective all wrong, if he wanted to continue for much longer in this
life but, reliant on the plants for sustenance in retreat, succour in regret,
uncourageous in a stupidity of persistence, he smoked and smoked, lived and breathed,
thinking and smoking himself into his hole.
He thought these thoughts, too, and more besides, much more,
in his room, absent from the camaraderie of his housemates, who guffawed in
malevolence of his sensitivity. Silent, solitary, all his accoutrements in
there with him; safe from the violence of the high spirits, the menace of the
thriving household beneath: food, kettle, mini cooker, growing his hair,
calling his folks less and less, engaging with humanity on a scale of
reduction, detoxifying from society into an impurity of chemically cursed
subjectivity.
A student of literature, in an apathetic fight to complete
university year three, a gifted student, but lost years ago to the notion of
romance his genre instilled. Lamentably his artistry was limited to the
quixotic concoction of character, devoid of any discernible creative talent,
more a reader and critic than great source, though, too, his skills here were
ebbing to third class perdition. This was his grief, a grief teased and tempted
through smoke, consumed to jump start his juices. Alas, no joy, just stubs and
nothing to show, save a few early and forlorn self-indulgent sentiments, the
shells, a husk before sunrise, rejected from every forum of endeavour, taking
to paints, pen, and dramatic performance equally maladroit, so into a
dependence of plumes, his back flat against the wall, hair growing into an
artwork of weaves, tying itself to the woodwork of floorboards, dragging him
into it, into the prostration of last rest.
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