Flat of Angles, Pt. 1 - Benedict Cumberbatch

I’ll miss you

I’ll miss our walks

Trying to pretend we are in perfect step

Out of step now

Sick on the floor

Out of the room

Fenced in, trapped

I can still hear the schoolchildren play outside at their usual 10: 30

It always used to annoy me, as I was trying to sleep, but it doesn’t now

It seems alright

A replacement, a continuation

Their sound jangles around the room

It sounds so different from where I’ve been

A party, alone

Packed in with others, but never feeling so alone

People dance too close

She was there, I had only gone because I hoped she would be

I had arrived early, as the the streetlights were coming on

So I took a long walk around the block

Taking a few extra lefts and rights

Past the Chicken Cottage and the Costcutter

Then along a crescent that arced me out of my way

Past a group of figures huddled

Under the entrance to the flats

Shielding the flicking lighter from the wind

This… area is little more

Than a traffic island

A triangle around which cars and coaches stream into town up the bleak Old Kent

Or out into Kent and the coast

The same faces trudge around there for yeas

«Spare some change please?

Much as possible.»

«You want to buy some weed.»

«Do you have a spare cigarette?»

He always wants one

And that one about weed was not a question

There is a Samaritans office between two everely dilapidated buildings on a

black-bricked terrace

It has a thermometer painted on a 10 ft wooden board nailed to the outside

There is red paint up to the £0 mark, and, an ambitious 10 ft higher

Is written £200, 000

It never got any warmer there

The Man begging in the corner makes me take a huge detour when going towards my

flat

He looks up with a pitiful stare that makes me want to kick the misery out of

him

His dipit wee cup of unwanted coffee

A child’s sleeping bag

JJB sports

A crack, a release, his poor exhaust

He was lost

The Broadway

The Town Hall, such a grand building, all nautical reminiscences, here,

far from water

It would be quite a sight if you could get far back enough from it to take a

look

But my back is up against the black panelling of the gay sauna opposite

A coach thunders by, and I run past the video shop that I owe £5 to

Meaning go way back

I may be becoming one of those people you see in New Cross

I have a book, peeping out of one pocket, at least want to look vaguely

intellectual if someone I know

Or worse, someone who knows me walks by

I throw down the finish can into the pile between two walls, outside my flat

Look, there’s the hardware store

It has a large cutout of a radiant man and woman in overalls

The woman handing the man a tin of paint, up his ladder, beaming

It has faded in the sun

I bought creosote from there, once

What a night!

Pure ment.

It was messy!

It was out of hand!

It was out of space!

I rapped on that track once, at Bagley’s, remember it?!

Skibbadee handed me the mic

I got to shout «I'M GONNA SEND HIM TO OUTER SPACE TO FIIIND ANOTHER RACE!»

Absolutely fantastic, those days…

The pills these days are not the same, they don’t work

No love