A walkin disaster

A walkin disaster

A chance meeting in November

on the Grand Parade side of Patrick's bridge

told me you were trying to get out

to the Regional as quickly as possible

as the head was gone

and you had to see your shrink

You were shuddering all over

like a builder breaking the road up with a jack-hammer

like you'd swallowed a bag of alarm clocks.

and as the shoppers and the students slopped by in the drizzle

and the stink of hops from Beamish was fouling my breath

I stood staring at your eyelids twitch

at the shivers rippling through your chins

at the tremors working their way from your shoulders and neck

all the way out through your fingertips

even the blondy wisps

on the mole

on your upper lip

were trembling

You told me your mom had caught you

necking a carton of weedkiller

in the garden shed a fortnight earlier

You only did that cos you were desperate

see they'd locked all the good knives and the bleach away in the cabinet

and pills just never seemed to work

no matter how many hundreds of the little bastards you took

you always fuckin well woke up

You told me all this cos one night when both of us were out of it

I'd  confessed to being half in love etc myself

You'd tried to kill yourself six or seven times in the last year

and the team had you on forty four tablets a day

Benzedrine, Lithium, Diazepan, Largactil, Seroxat,

and so on and so on and so on

all the brand names with global recognition from three year olds

the Big Macs and the Pepsi Colas of legally marketable dope

guaranteed to cure your mind of everything

It was the lithium you reckoned made you shake

though you were given another pill to calm the shakes

but that other one gave you night-sweats and the runs

you were a human experiment

think I shake bad huh- you should hear me fuckin rattle

at home with your parents and brother

you felt like a walkin disaster

like you were a crack in the crust of the earth

biding your time before opening out to swallow them up

I could identify and said how I sometimes felt

like I was both the iceberg and the captain of the ship

and we could have gone on batting similes

but you needed some real help real quick

anyway we parted promising to hook  up back in Clon

sometime soon for a few small wans and a  couple of tokes

but that all happened a good few years ago now

and last I heard you'd  mellowed out

and were doing a whole lot better

the shaking had stopped and

you'd got yourself a girlfriend

and set yourself up as a dealer