David Howard
		Private Life The private life drama, baby, count me out - The Pretenders When your father died you became lighter by the five stone his cancer had left. A bonfire of letters curling over a semi-detached home into the nothing it partitions; opportunity’s stomping ground a quagmire of washing-line, mower, concrete blocks stacked against the shed where he smoked over porno. You enjoy an aunt’s belated accolades. Choice. Then that perennial second cousin, Monday, pulls up; an orphanage’s despair fertilises the firs bordering your property. Spirited as a discharged patient, you skip the rest of the story, lifting off from your ‘home’ town.You were born on a rocky ridge pocked by quarries - there’s no perspective emptier; understanding was the gap between cerulean and cobalt. Your tennis clothes sweat gently as this morning lifts you clean off the earth. Recreation becomes penance and paradise is a glass of pear nectar. Words are no longer of this moment itself, but your experience of it self, which is beyond comprehension: It is vanity to desire anything that is past. The misery afterwards was, of course, a luxury.