We shared a room...
Martin and I,
At first I thought - a real cool guy,
But just like me, a mere smear fool,
By accident we found life's rule :
"It isn't cool, to be here at all..."
Stoned rambling or a judgment
call?
Those words we scribbled on our wall,
The late wind blew the leaves to fall,
Martin with his drawn, white pall,
Not even cool to BE at all...
Fourteen years old,
They threw him out,
So he lived round and thereabout,
Some gay guys helped him find his place,
Because he had a pretty face,
They kept him schooling, any case.
He knew so much,
That I'd not seen,
Learned from those gay old dragon queens,
The drugs, the music, all of that,
The emptiness of life in flats,
The acid novels, cool, cool cats...
Our room was just,
One great debauch,
Burning beacon, flaming torch,
They guessed their best to see inside,
A place to hang-out, place to hide,
Night moths flew in from far and wide...
Their dodgy secrets
Pinned on us,
We bought the farm, I bit the dust,
I'd learn to sup life's thinnest gruel,
No more a fish in that small pool,
Official label : "Most Uncool".
Spring,Summer came,
As Winter went,
I strolled across the green anent
The questing throng who'd crowd and trawl,
Through the lists stuck to the wall,
I wasn't cool, to be there, at all.
Andy Morley 11th December
2006
This is about a guy I shared a room
with when I was 19 or 20. It's also about all those
entertaining people we knew in our youth and who
probably never made it through to a comfortable
middle age.
Anyone who's seen the UK TV
documentary called Seven-Up will remember the
three little posh boys at prep school. One of them
was Charles - he was at one of the other colleges
of the same university. Martin (my room mate) had
lots of gay friends who found Charles fascinating.
Martin, though not gay himself, thought Charles
really was the epitome of 'cool'. Then one late
night, I persuaded Martin that being cool just
didn't matter and that in fact, being alive was
fundamentally really uncool. We didn't much fancy
being dead, so we wrote on our wall the words "It
isn't cool to be here at all..." just so's we'd
remember about it in the morning as we were both a
bit the worse for wear at the time..
Our room was a right ol' den of
iniquity. Arguably, Martin was the one behind it
all - the architect of all the debauchery that went
on there I would say. But he convinced the college
authorities to let him stay. Whatever - I spoke to
his brother a few years ago - he'd had no contact
with Martin for 10 years. Last heard of in a bedsit
in Manchester. Like I say, a lot of those
entertaining people of our youth just don't make
grown-up life. I hope I'm wrong about Martin, but
the general principle is true.
Charles the TV dude went undercover
too - check out the documentaries for that story
and more info on his rather strange behaviour... He
seemed to make such an issue of being cool that I
found it painful to watch him in real life. But
then, I was a grammar-school boy who'd spent a
gap-year working on building sites, so I found most
of the public-shool kids in his college pretty
pretentious. But if you read the Wikipedia, he
tried to sue the documentary makers because he
thought some of the photos they'd published of him
weren't cool enough. Maybe someone ought to tell
him that litigation is pretty uncool...
So this poem is also a statement
about life. We're a long time dead, and while we're
here, life's too important to waste time being
precious and trying to be cool. That's what I
reckon anyway...
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