So long, Francois, my deep, dark brother. And fuck you, you bastard.
I tried working with the liquor on this one, but the keys just keep swimming and the words collapse unto themselves like echoes in a void. Weed doesn’t work either. This, oh supreme irony, will have to be done dry.
I still, quite literally, can’t believe that you’re gone. You had me going there for a moment: I honestly wondered if maybe you faked it. I mean, I couldn’t put such a macabre ruse past you, not after all those nights of scenting the midnight oil with your fiery visions of joining the French Foreign Legion or fleeing to some hidden cabin in the Canadian woods or whatever the hell, as long as you could disappear in a mute blaze of glory and leave the blunt rot of citizenry to the dupes and the slicks.
All being said, it would seem that you’ve indeed passed on to the lone back road where dust devils puff on the great spliff in the sky. The details remain sketchy, but I hope you were not alone in that final lunge. Then again, perhaps that’s exactly what you wanted. Little choice left but to embrace the mystery.
One thing’s for certain, though: the Days are now finally done for. The ones that lived through them are few, and those that survived, in one way or another, are even fewer. The shit we got up to back then is simply too strange and wild and holy to be true, and yet it was horribly real, in a time and place that can no longer be. Even if we could recount those surreal tales to blasphemous strangers with any real measure of honour or shame, no one would believe it. And how could they? The truth of those times is barely hanging on in the ragged souls that lived them. And now the Slight Shark has left the building. Johnny Runner is sprinting full tilt through the stars with hell on his heels, just one more fallen warrior-poet heading home by the light of a veiled Alexandria’s burning bridges.
To wit: the frames flit through my head like heron’s claws, curled by time and dissonance. The winter eve we first met, it was raining in Dorp Street and I was stumbling along stoned and barefoot in a coat that I stole from Heidi’s ex and you gave me that gnomish devil’s grin when I mistook you for Marthinus Basson. That night in the rat-infested hostel in London where those Turks kept eyeing us from the top bunk and you casually slipped the knockoff Okapi blade from your backpack and laid it on your chest. The wee witching hour after our poetry book launch, ripped on rye and Fear in the streets, when I got hit by a car and you’re screaming no, no, no till I got up and fished the half-jack from my jeans and the two of us staring mesmerized at the amber miracle of the bottle still being whole. That morning we ripped the Trellidor from its hinges at Adolph’s flat while he was coming down from meth and God knows what else, the groupies inside shrieking like loons and the redhead’s nails raking scented straits into my face. And yes, the last time we saw each other, in the burnished dusk when I ran into you by pure divine chance in that godforsaken border town where you tried to cut yourself off from the world, chopping wood outside the bar, your face drawn with shock and a weird sense of reprieve like a criminal relieved to at long last be caught. Shrooms on the train. Vodka on ice. Nick Cave and Whipping Boy. De Akker and Africa Day.
As Gertjie said, with that shaman’s swagger, after I broke the news: one by one the seats are turning idle. Fucking hell, man. The saints have grown old. At least you don’t have to worry about that anymore.
I even spoke to Rob after all these years, can you believe that? It felt wrong to break radio silence with one of the greatest living poets in the English language (at least we’ve always agreed on that) after such a long time with the gravest of tidings, but he took it with stoic reserve. He’s a family man now, running the gauntlet of the Great Machine. The maestro of honest betrayals has still got it, for what it’s worth; I once again felt myself slipping beneath the quicksilver spell of his lofty timbre. He thought it wise to remind me of the way you always signed off your emails to him - when you still bothered to write - with the words lifted from one of his closers: integrity, fidelity, belief.
Now those words seem futile and forlorn. Glib, even. Perhaps we were little more than a band of thuggish templars, however noble the Cause. Sure, we very nearly turned the poetry scene on its head with the wrath of the uninitiated. We tested the seams of sanity and art, flesh and fraternity, and somehow the centre seemed to hold. For a while. But that’s the thing about flying too close to the sun: eventually it all has to come crashing down. In the end we were no better than the angels we cheated. We landed akwardly in the godawful quiksand that most manner of men come to call the world, our ashen wings trampled by crooks and dullards.
I know you saw it all coming in the darkness, while I deemed it better to be blinded by the muck. I don’t know how you managed to ease yourself out without looking back, leaving the coal mine to the canaries and heading for the terrible Light in the yonder mountains. I’m still pissed that you never returned my calls or dire correspondence after being reunited out there after all those years for a single night by twisted providence. If I knew back then that that would be the last time we’d ever speak, I would have sat up with you ‘till dawn like we used to do, racing wolves to the end of the Johnnie Walker rainbow.
In the end you never made it to the dread of middle age, after all those years we’ve lived as if every day was a good day to die. Just as well. Much has been lost. These are unkind times for the Great Bohemian Heart, and it’s getting worse by the fucking second. But I guess you knew that all along. The circus has really taken a wrong turn somewhere, the cages riddled with empty technocratic circuitry where all and sundry must jump through flaming hoops to earn their beating or bucket of slop at the stifled hands of soulless wonders. Go figure. Death to duende and in algorhithm we trust.
So be it. Now there’s no one left to look out for fools and muses, nor those in peril on the sea. That’s allright. You did what you could. Pity about The Hero’s Welcome, though, that tavern we always talked about opening one day where men could find solace from their unwitting prey. Look alive, bro: this is me saying farewell, you dear disaster, something you never allowed me to do. Johnny Yen has set himself on fire again.
You still owe me ten large that I had to repay through horrors you could not imagine, but I’ll let it slide. Just promise me that you will find the answers to the great calculus of longing and where true Poetry comes from, now that it has gone. Oh, and what exactly the one thing is that Meatloaf just won’t do for love.
I hope you find forgiveness from all the hitchikers we passed by on the road trip to Rapture, and the bodies we left in the fast lane’s wake. If there’s any grace left out there in the great beyond, please save some from me. I’ll catch a ride out soon enough.
‘Till then, burn bright, lovely motherfucker. May there always be a seat at the bar for you, the whore that ever hustled. The king that should have conquered. The man that never was.
