Tom's Place

I was up all night
snorting speed with an ex con,
poor man’s coke he called it,
in his basement flat
next to the main road,
where petrol fumes made up 50% of the air
and where the brown river fudged along
like a worm that couldn’t be bothered.
He taught me how to play chess,
the prison way and
We talked about the rusty banana bridge opposite,
people sometimes hung themselves there
desperate souls who found no beauty in life.
Our monkey faces stared back 
as he raked out another line on the mirror,
like some weird zen garden
and I thought 
yeah
it’s easy to lose time in a place like this.
The hairy guy sitting opposite -
he could be a monk
except that I heard he lived with six rats
in one room where he never opened the curtains.
Imagine that.
I watched as a blim fell from his spliff
burning another pothole in the carpet
and I wished I was far away.