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Pearspective

On the rocking chair again

Head butting to and fro on an axis of uncertainty,

straining for meaning with every creak of the wooden slats.

Despite being stationary there is still a view and I gaze with soft

fascination out of the window of the flat.

I could be much worse off.

But oh to live in the woods,

amongst the timorous industry of birds and the free choice of their song,

a gift and rebuke and a carefree nothing at all.

The kaleidoscope colours of half formed thoughts tessellate with feelings

of freedom to make a mirage in my mind.

I rise out of the open window and climb the contours of the air.

Past delicate configurations of dandelion seeds,

hesitant on the gentle wind.

Past magpies revelling in the joy of pairs.

See the swifts in all their synchronicity rush the sunset and scatter into refracted light.

High enough now to view the world on staccato pause.

There I make friends with a jubilant cloud that looks like a spaceship.

We tussle and dib dab along together discussing everything

from the quiet secrets of the soil to the anguish in the air.

The cloud spits rain on my head to lighten the mood.

Then it summons a deluge.

Well-watered now my head sprouts a pear tree,

it drops down past my ears and dangles about.

As the pears grow so my weight increases and I begin to sink down to earth,

a gift to those who wait.

 

I am not ready I think.

I plunge past the magpies distracted by the joy of pairs

and land in the city farm.

There I bow down at the pig trough.

The pigs come, stabbing at the pears

with their snouts and laughing in hysterics.

The cloud laughs along with them.

Waters Meet

Soaked in thanks for

Light and Sensation

That tumble thoughts

That bind to creation
Wholly joy
in natural courts

Out pours 
fresh 
celebration

Gratitude renews 
mind contorts

So flows the law

Water Falls 
on 
Fools and dreamers

Fresh ringlets scatter
Each splash generative
Skin alert
to the plumes of cleansing pressure

A mind full of now
Re-aligned with the body

Closed eyes hint at inner ritual
Shouts of celebration 
Usher in life renewed

Thin Air

The slavery abolition act was pulled out of parliament in 1833

62 years later Bristol shoved up an effigy of Colston

So that those walking through the centre could eddy around him

As they made their contributions to the city.

125 years on and finally the plinth hosts thin air

Some quarters are suddenly concerned for our history

Now they do not control it.

Posturing that we need people

(They mean men)

On pedestals

To truly learn the lessons of the past

Well Colston stood frozen in time for over a century

What did we learn from lionising his transgressions?

Venerating that ‘virtuous and wise son of Bristol’

For that is how the plaque described him.

So the lessons were actively obscured

Facts kept in chains whilst his inequity

Walked free

The trauma of Slavery allowed to dominate

Reign over the city with impunity

As we praised his ill-gotten gains paraded as gifts

What was left to silence permeated Bristol life

Propagated unconscious bias and learnt racism

For what remains unseen remains unchallenged

The system is still rancid

You only have to look to the top

Or at the complicity of my own comfortable life

 

When he lived Colston was bolstered by churchmen and intellectuals

As he gorged on the vitality of the African continent 

The elite closed ranks and sanitised the inexcusable

Greed, hatred and indifference perverted the flow of empathy

The comforting blanket of exceptionalism proved racist and vile

That dangerous consensus, the normal, had humans in chains

Wrenched from home and kin, families shattered

Languages lost, Bodies broken, screaming anguish

Disconnected from ancestors and primal lands

Boat after stuffed boat of mind-body-soul reduced to goods

Beautiful humans primed for freedom in every stich of sinew

Forced to suffer exponentially

The loss forever lingers

So much potential unexplored

 

The herd had their heads in the sand

In 1977 he became a grade II listed structure

‘noted’ now, only noted, for his involvement in the slave trade

A record so flaccid and neutral in the face of utter brutality  

In the 90’s campaigns and petitions simmered

And fell on the unfeeling and partial agendas of

Influential white people

By the end of the 90’s someone named him with

Histories truth  

SLAVE TRADER was scrawled at his base

History is complex and never neat

We keep working it out in the present

To capture a man and keep him out of time

Aloof and lording it over a changing world

Is a fantasy and a violence

The arc of history is towards justice and a deeper harmony

but only if we put our backs into it

Often it unfolds too slow

If you cannot breathe now

Then a confected history is not only an affront

But a weapon

May it disappear into thin air

May the sober and horrifying truth rush in with the wind

Slate

When the rains come streams furrow the brow of the fell

Slate slabs claw raise and crag

Metamorphose valley written on fluid rock

The layered wilds of cyan stone groan, with age

Scratched at land invites me

To decipher her scrawl

A story born of fire

Volcanic violence ushered in ash

Squeezingitselfbreathless deep annunder hard rock reached for air

Harsh forms waiting to become

The fox’s borran and outpost to the savage rook

Mined at Honister, slate lined faces smashed at ancient crease

Struck cold cleavage shedding layers with skin

Hard men peeling back the passage of time

Millennia mulling over change

Suddenly static strata

Skimmed by laal bairns across the dub

Glistening wet exposed

Layer

Slowly something so cold

Comes to mean sanctuary

Homestead slate

At yam by the hearth annunder slate

Green grain stacked against rain

Drip grey roofs clad in moss

Layer

Family heat at kitchen table going no where

Layer

Offspring flake away your youth crumbled

Layer

Every sight a joy each breath bright

Layer

Spider’s web holds weary walls

And between the chinks

Stiff wisdom knits fractured memories

Lays still

Faces to the ground, The Gravestone Gurn

Slate the thread in life now dead

Attic Room

Written years ago I revisit this relic with cynical claws and leave it having learned something from my younger self.

1.

Reclined in time to the churning locomotion of this creaking flat

Decrepit plumbing ponders another bar of free form improv

The rinds of fresh melon lazily submit
their              gnawed               exposed               flesh.

Handle howls,

into his bag pipe flute like a Nobel madman with an uncomfortable message.

Still it’s wonderful.
Harry gazes serenely through the music contemplating his own howl, now. As though Ginsberg would grace these pages

2.

White wine turns to tequila,

no reason to speak of, just opportunity.
Is it a pose or sweet poise? Teenage in my transgressions
I contemplate my next move and receive a message, which reads and glows.

‘Do you reckon you could give George the 80pound and I’ll give it to you next week? Just got

stopped by the pigs so running late. 

Fly into the rising sun, take her breathe and sing loud!’

The text was included in a voyeuristic pang of adventure by association. A veil or Trojan horse

3.
Do you sip tequila? Again I ask my imaginary audience
knowing warmly they know I know more than I seem to Alluding to evasive worldly experience
And their laughs pierce my armour and shipwreck this cloud.
Here is a pose, I strike it as I strike this match,
cigar smoke glides and lingers like the ego of my wisdom, because knowledge is smoke. Yet, this
cigar, these words its more than a game, more than the pose of pretence.
My meta thinking the illusion of self awareness
Fuelled pretending, but with energy, a joy, the curiosity that creates.
This experience is holy.

Then I tell on myself. Open my mouth to assert paint. Make up. Shut up.

4.
Sitting in.

Reading poetry. Yea right

Drinking Guinness.

Thinking about playing my saxophone. Thinking about it
Drawing breathe, my mind driven forward by the    blat    blat   of the jazz grooves.

5.
Stretching off the etched weight of sleep.
Thick air and blankets separate me from the truth of the day and quickness.
Everything feels

tepid     and     slow.

This lazy spell can’t hold me,
Trumpet glory

a 

roar
and toss sensation.
Steps sound on the stairs.
The wild immediacy of life awaits.

6.
Your rhythm dominates and keeps us, coo the angels to the saxophone and the ships to the sea.
It’s within your rhythm that this angelic mariner feels free.
Cross stitch of shadow
on
the
red
bed
The mundane stays that way

Today is full and blossoming, I do everything.

7.
I’ve found a new position
To lie down whilst massaging self-obsessed thoughts into liquid form.

To    drink    my     fill.

There’s always more to say,
I look up and the lamp, it did sway.
I feel like I am in the midst of several love affairs sometimes.  Love affairs conspicuously absent
With my different friends,
And my different interests
Each betrays the other in their nonfulfillment

Unmet potential and the trappings of time.

8.
I’ve crossed oceans of time to arrive at this point,
journeyed across a pacific to this place, of now.
The tired heavy now that greets me, nostalgic and whisky warm
But not without a sense of the never ending doom,
of lives lived
Miles has blown these sounds for as long as the sounds existed.
Now that’s creation
I tell this attic room that must by now have a discerning spirit

And be bored

Finally a revelation

Walls as they are adorned and colourful
Stand accusing
Undermined by their architect

9.
The light is soft this morning.

A toneless still.

I strain past the skits and rattles of the old room
To a place of silence and sanctuary.
Even amongst the artificial gibberish God ministers to my soul.
More fearful now to play my hand, place that in a valuesMEME

I dread in this moment, those times I make a loud parade over saying the right thing

Which 

is 

no thing.

For taking off with the latest fads
Scratching out the eternal spirit of life and clumsily scrawling a whim in its wake.
Birdsong flutters in, falling from the crooked tall tree.
I notice again the top branch at a jaunty angle completing with a flourish the alpine cone.
An elemental wizards hat.

How can we convulse and leak love, projectile?

It’s not what I swallow that muddies the endless pool but what I vomit out
Self-sacrifice was Jesus’s way.
His invitation was to follow.

Mother Theresa
Hitchens hunted her too
Tripping over heels to name check an alternative view and insinuate balance
I see her serene, and blue
The shape of a bullet
She sacrificed herself
And to find her true self waiting

And she spent her whole life doubting God and mourning his betrayal

M T came to understand she was to be an angel of darkness.
For what good is it to get to heaven but loose the real you?
Sure her history has holes, only here - I choose the view
Heels dug into the face of confusion
Birdsong flutters through the open window to gently war with a mechanical mash
Tools of a building site
in sight of my becoming.

10.
In a loose fitting towel, blue and coarse against my skin
I am dreaming of writing the sapphire in a sky
May you come to know these throated whisperings
I rely on whim and mistake 
The slip of my loosely held pen dissolves the sapphire
To leave a dribbled reality
Of rain and mist
Rain and mist which in another mood
Would mood me and move me
A sapphire promise
Yet to notice such a thing, and, believe it like now
Leaves me open again
Happy in the gloom of the room.
Creative scar tissue that flares up still

11.
I am drawn again into the allure of that crumbled spot, of cushions and candle wax
Where my lover lay askew
'Lover' to allude to many, a lie

And I saw her again as new

Now we work quietly
To the chant of soft electronic music,
Honing our minds to acknowledge the calm of the morning
Content smelling the coffee of the new day.

12.
The dead flowers over there in the turgid water
They are still beauty
Unlike before, fresh and d a n c i n g
They stand fragile and poised.
Furnished in faded colour
Refined and elegant
Slowly though the shrivelled petals turn to dust and fall to the shells below
Straining to exist
Forever it will in emptiness

A flailing star swallowed by a black hole

That beautiful dust lingers and embeds itself in this place.
Still, pale, untouchable beauty.
A princess forever in her tower

Enshrined in natures rhythm and redeemed by it.

13.
A table of useless papers
Nonsense,
Like the incomprehensible scattered stones and other tired trinkets.

I can’t read these dam lines anyway!
Past messages wounded the sub conscious 
I have let my herbal tea go cold.
Why cry into this faded scrawl
Why, for what, do I write at all?

14.
Waiting
    I
  am
   an
  edge
My seat lying dormant on the floor
Waiting on top of this ledge
Trembling into the summer,

I don’t listen anymore
I notice the faint decrepit smells of this place

And the piano undulates above the sobs of the wind

But I am not sad, no
Only waiting.

15.
I like this room
Couldn't let it go
In it I poured over names and helplessness
And have shed tears, even shared tears
Today I wait for the end,
Oli will arrive soon and jono and my brother and another
And another
In this room
People stayed
Plans were laid and dens made
Peace was found
Like love all around

And    the    wine    flowed

As the time slowed

Music played
Yes, friends stayed.
Here
Food savoured like the company

And rhymes smashed for the sake of honesty

Which cries deep from this place

And is cemented concrete less in my heart

No more static than a bird in flight or night time wind.

Very Short Stories

1. Mother Water

2. Sharing a Birthday

3. Park Alien

Mother Water

Finally my day is ending. I grab a Dark Beer Lao and relish the hiss of the murky larger as I open it. Free beer, a perk of the job. I flop down heavily onto our tribal style reclining cushions that the tourists love so much. These same cushions I patrol during the day collecting empty drinks and uneaten food. Now I have time. I let out a luxurious sigh and roll my head back, looking up at the weaving of the bamboo roof. The discolored buff of the structure already looks old. I recall teasing the lithe green strips into place during repairs at the end of the last rainy season. The tension and danger of fresh bamboo is still a source of joy to me, its strength and simplicity remind me of home. Of cutting myself on its sharp fibers as a child, wielding a machete and feeling like father. I’ve not been back now for many years. I try to remember the smells of home. Slowly I wind down and begin to enjoy the position of the platform, it’s a good bar and it has been my work for years now. After a brief, but free, schooling at the monastery I had intended to pay my way through higher education but things aren’t always so simple. I linger for a while in lost dreams whilst feeling the hot wind build for a storm. Where have those political aspirations gone? No longer does the restless fiery rage of my motivation toss and thunder or drive me on. Still, I am happy.

The Me Kong winds beneath me, Mother Water it’s called here. My feet stretched out point to an open vision of the lazy bulging current. She speaks to me of permanence and a lasting origin. Long before human imagination named her, there she was behaving as she does. Yet, it is illusion, she too will cease. My life flickers before me, wrapped up in the impermanence of all things. Down on the muddy banks children play and their parents wash. It is the same view which draws the western crowds in their droves. They come for our lighting and the menu. I watch each day as they grease their lips with burgers and toy with their phones, letting everyone back home know what Laos is like. There not all like that of course. My ex – she was different, more wide eyed, more lost, far kinder. I put my bare feet up on the table. Eyes wandering aimlessly I notice someone’s iPod in an ash tray, lost property is not uncommon at closing. Eager for a good one I pick it up and scroll. Her greatest import was music, it’s all she left, that and me wondering where she is now and what happened. She’ll be in her own country of course, finally obedient to the allure of normalcy. It was inevitable we would be crushed by the centrifugal force of her roots.  Anyway, I am grateful to her for exposing me to the wide universe of music out there.  I settle back into the immediacy of the moment. Rhythms unfold. Driving, tumbling beats from another shore. Malutu Astakae calls to me from Ethiopia. Its vitality is primal and has me rising to new planes. Leaning into the adventure I am spurred on and cradled by deep tones of exotic tongue. I journey with no intention. I try to be still and absorb the bat bat stabs of the screaming groove. I lift the beer to my mouth, breathing deeply through my nose I fill my lungs, I tip then swallow, and pause, holding the moment, then releasing air hard I let out a harmonized smack of my lips. There is only sweeping bliss.

Before me the cobalt sky drains into a violet scowl, contorting constantly in color and shape the sky sets for me. I watch the crimson violence of day’s final breath. It fills me with the anticipation of loss. Music unhurried and euphonic now I am elsewhere. I am holding the dying hand of my Father. His ragged breath is joined by the sound of the jungle, me fighting back the tears, hearing everything. We are nestled amongst the hills of our Northern Farm, the water singing by us rushes to meet Mother another life away. He had hardly left the area, nor had his Grandfather before him. He had watched his way of life decay around him before he had breathed his last breath. Both of us knew I would leave as soon as I had delivered him back to the cradled scent of his soil. I exhale and say my only prayer – ‘Thank you Father’ - my way of keeping him with me and fighting his gradual fading. With twilight comes the building thunder of that future storm, dark clouds tumble in from distant seas, the calm of the sky gracefully exits.  I wonder if time exists without change, and nobody to even watch it.

As dusk takes hold, saxophone diffuses into my consciousness; it is raw, ragged and streaming. The solo continues with a confidence and energy I can't contain, it is both a straining and arrival. I am going, go, go. I am hit with a jolt into now. Pleasure in presence reigns. I am floating in folds of bliss and nothingness. There is infinite space. For me it is the head back embrace of the 'I' that exists between my thoughts.  

Music stops, I pocket the pod and grab the mop.

Sharing a Birthday

Keith lurched down the alley with a singular madness in his eyes. Every scrap of him was out for drama and violence. The leering walls of concrete sadness wound narrow ahead of him. Distant Street light shimmered off an overflowing drain. Keith shouted with frantic menace at a passing man,

“You with the hood! Keep walking…Aght, Fucking prick, yea you keep walking!”

The man shuffled by folding into himself, all hunched and pocketed. Startled into irritation he pulled his hood further over his furrowed brow. More tumbled out of Keith, only a passenger to his venom now,

“Fucking Fuck, ya Twat. Look at me! You better walk away.”

Keith kicked the wall and spat spit and words like he needed something. The man rounded the corner, turned around fleetingly and stumbled. He pulled himself straight and screamed, lung deep and sure,

“You’re lucky it’s my Birthday”

  

The resonance of those barely audible words danced around the surprised Keith, by the time he had pulled them from the air, through his ears to his brain the Man was out of sight.

The Man continued on his journey, stretching down the stubborn street, squinting into the half light. Heart rate high now, to match the excitement that had bubbled in him all day. He had worn the feeling at work. It had been invincible armour unseen. He passed that new bar already flaunting its expensive lighting and gaping door. Hot congeniality, or could it be conjugality, oozed from the faintly misted windows. Thinking only of home and his evening to come, he imagined it all lolling rapturously before him, the one day he was due compliance. Passing the garish garage signalled the final stretch of the familiar walk. He bounded up the beaten stairs and scrabbled with the lock, bursting into the flat. The empty flat.

Quickly disheartened. Quickly restless, he checked each room in that carefree fashion only possible to fake. Feigning peace the Man in absent minded despondency began laying the table. He sat, and then rose, he shuffled the take away menus around and arranged the angles. The ticking of the black chrome wall clock, wonky again, seemed manically loud. The Clementine brushed steel chair, in white, kept obstinately flicking about from under him and rocking. Everything was annoying to him, everything a source of discomfort and a jibe. Agitated he paced, in one movement he was sat again lighting a candle, still excited.  Catching himself he tried to convince his ubiquitous imaginary audience, that the candle was an ironic taunt, not hope. The man poured himself a glass of wine and thought of that guy in the street earlier, and thought about sex, both with feelings like nostalgia, a faintly familiar energy that hung in the air about him. He poured more wine in time to his ticking clock.  

Somewhere else at that time, Penelope downed another glass of red. Her hands arched softly together forming a platform for her delicately placed head. She gazed ahead, eye-balling a woman across the bar. Longing with the whole of herself, a surge of inner parts, her all, a swirling. Penelope was toying with her next move, massaging rehearsed lines to life. She bathed in the heat radiating from the charged patter of punters plotting and flirting about her.

Across the bar the Woman swapped legs in a new tangle and fumbled with her purse. Conscious suddenly, recognising wistfully those wolfish eyes.

“Would you care for another drink?”  Sang Penelope from the other side of the bar, only gloss and elegance.

“I have to be somewhere sorry, I’ve just remembered. Lovely bar you have here. thank you!”

The women replied, words tumbling as she spun into her heavy coat. Knowingly she flicked one last glance over her shoulder at the ever waiting Penelope.

The Women burst into the rush of the cold air. A silent street stretching its way home baited her. She clattered down the pavement keeping her head fixed forward and trying not to think. Some pigeons rustled unseen above, the occasional car swept by, nothing else. The Women kept up her anonymous charge all the way to the heavily lit garage. A mirage of life, nothing else. The illusion of normality gave her breath back. She bought flowers with conviction then dithered over the chocolate and wine until she bought both.

“You’re up late love”

The bulky man behind the checkout called, as she left. What was it about the name on his badge, she thought whilst wrestling with the cold door. Now giving in to the torrent of names that churned in her unconscious, surprising herself. Thrilling herself, scaring herself, flinching from those faces which resonated familiar and unwelcome in her mind. Always in her thoughts like a child to fire, the bar lady vaulted to the fore front, jumping the queue, elbowing her way into the foray of the Women’s inner world. She wondered wistfully how things might have been between them, played out the other versions of the story to their various glorious endings. Was she a coward for never speaking to her properly, or wise?

Jolted she looked up to see a familiar somebody, sat head in hands on a bench spotlighted by the neon petrol signage. A chaos of drink littered the floor. Drawing closer with trepidation the Women girdled herself, realising just in time it was not him. Still recognisable from somewhere, the spectre on the bench stirred and poured forth pain from the darkness of his eyes,

“It was my birthday today”

He slurred violently, shuddering, the Women turned her head. Her thoughts now on a different man and the sleepless rigor-mortis of the night. Clinging to the notion that it was all indulgent illusion she entered into the mechanical process of owning her choices. Too much she mused anxiously, way too much, but only her flames reigned. Still they remained solidly, as she scrabbled with the lock at the door.

Now only a passenger to her deep despair, into the stuffy clutch of the ticking flat the Woman went. The Man was propped at the table, candle still flickering over his delicately placed head. With summoned lightness and fear, her words breezed into the forlorn air,  

“Happy birthday! So sorry I’m late. Nightmare. Believe me!”

Park Alien

Scene 1 – Bus stop

Seth: (Breathing heavily, running) ohh! Ohhh! Oh

[Collides with Joe]

Joe: Oh

Seth: Looks like it’s the walk then.

Joe: Yup well, don’t spend so long choosing sweets next time.

Seth:  No sure. Best cut through the park then. I’ve got piano at six.

Joe: Bit dark and grim for that mate.

Seth: Nah, come.

Joe: Best not. I fink I’ll call ma mum.

Seth: Fair

Joe: Don’t you want a lift…?

Seth: Nah. I’ll be on Parliament Hill in 20.

[Seth turns on his heel, earphone go in, starts humming a pop song]

Joe: See you tomorrow.

Scene 2 – Hampstead Heath

[Seth still humming/singing collides with a crouched over man.]

Man: oomph!

Seth: Awe no, shit, my harribo is all soggy.

Man: Haaa [spluttering nasal laugh]

Seth: What! You laughing? [gathers himself begins to move on a bit shaken]

Man: Come here you have left your sweeties.

Seth: Oh yea… ch cheers [reaches cautiously for packet]

Man: Cough

[Seth jumps back quickly]

Man: Come here [still coughing]

[Seth reaches and snatches]

Man: Where are you heading?

Seth: Home

Man: I love this place….(breath)

[pause]

Seth: See you!  

Man:  Young man, wait. Wait young man. Come and see what is under this stump.

Seth: I’ve got a piano less..

Man: Look, I’ve not seen this one before. It’s a pretty.

Seth: Yea. Bye then.

Man: No! Look. Look. Closer. (cough) get close.

Seth: It’s a mushroom. Don’t like mushrooms… Bye.

Man: Do you want to eat it with me young man?

Seth: Eh?

Man: Tight, deep, purple gills. Brown shaggy cap. Developed nipple.

Seth: Looks poisonous to me. I heard of one called a death cap that is deadly.

Man: Can you tell me what a death cap looks like? It’s a joy to eat what can be found. Most are safe to eat, most are ok (cough splutter)

Seth: It’s got dirt on it. Shouldn’t eat stuff from the ground mate.

[pause]

Man: Better not eat those sweets of yours then.

Seth: Five second rule.

Man:  Which is deadly, which is yummy, I bet your mummy _ hasn’t taught you.

(raising voice) Look out there at the cosy city lights, what a view. What a picture… Not taught these things anymore.(cough) I can taste the fear. A city full of passengers, impotent. Reliant, little baby chicks (cough) squawking for food.  Once upon a time the facts were passed ancestor to ancestor. They all fed free on mushrooms of every type, catholic in colour and taste.

Seth: Catholic, right. Think I’d rather stick to Tesco’s.

Man: Trust Tesco’s. (Muttering) Trust Tesco. Trust… Trust.

Seth: Best go then.

Man: Listen lad.

Seth: Bye

Man: 214

Seth: What?

Man: 214 (cough) I’ve eaten 214 different mushrooms. Look, Look [flicks open forlorn little book] Look this one I first found on a little spit of grass over by Tower 42, see, you can see it from here _ it gave me diarrhoea for a week. This one here that was just sweat and salivating for a day or two.

Seth: Salivating, spit! Disgusting. [man coughing]

Man: This one here, delicious and meaty.

Seth: Where was that?

Man: By the ponds here on the heath. All delicious (cough). I found the same type by the southbank too, you can see from here, look _ by the London eye.

Seth: I’ve not noticed this view before, its well good. And any by St Pauls?

Man: Ha oh yes, this one. Stomach cramps and mild hallucinations.

[Seth laughs as the Man coughs.]

Seth: Aw, the rain!

Man: Did you know mushrooms are the sexual organs of the fungi below, pocking themselves up out the ground.

Seth: (distracted by rain) What. No I didn’t know that. Listen I gotta go. If I run I might be able to catch a lift off Joe.

Man: I have a dry shelter not far from here.

Seth: Bye…

Man: Wait (cough) I’m dying.

[Seth pause mid-stride, looks back]

Seth: Bye, Good to meet you mate.

Man: Wait. (cough) Take this book for me. Please.

Seth: K, sure. But I need to go.

[Seth takes it, man takes his hand]

Man: Good boy.

[Seth breaks away begins to run]

Man: (calling after him) Trust yourself young man. Trust yourself.