A beginning

 

 

Picture a man. It'd be misleading to call him a boy. Picture the wild look in his eyes, something of that desperate millennial nihilism. End of the Century sort-of angst. If you wanted to be cynical you could say he was crying but personally I don't like to pry into my own business.

Picture hands; Dirty, sweaty, one balancing an elegant 12-bore shotgun on a Levi'd leg, the other messing about with the whole business of a dreadful mobile telephone. When he's made up his mind at last to go ahead, he shakes as he waits for the ringing. He almost laughs out loud as he gets to a cheery, clipped voice;

"Welcome to the O2 messaging service. The person you are calling is unable to take your call, please leave your message after the tone"

And for the second time in his life, he does.

Picture a face. Attractive in a kind-of consumptive Parisian junkie rent-boy way. Consider the vague grin that can mean anything, the empty depths of an expression that only morphine and exhaustion can produce. It's amazing how liberating heartbreak and opiates can be. At heart everyone wants to die eventually, otherwise they wouldn't go on living.

Understand that from the outside this would mean nothing. Just another little savage jetski cut through the waves of a downswooping bipolar mind. On the other hand, this grungey Rimbaud is slowly running out of time before the screen fades to black. Pause. Gunshot. Roll credits.

I don't usually write this way; so precise. But I think it's important you get an image in your mind, it's important that you see it from above. Like a sea-gull over a shipwreck. No-one would watch an action film that glossed over the violence, people like to see the damage incurred by a controlled explosion propelling a considerable ouncage of powdered lead shot into the weak jawline of a failed poet.

So picture a closed coffin waiting to happen.