In the Graveyard, the monument moved in the morning by Joe Kennedy

You have to become a creature of routines I hear myself saying as her foot kicks over the coffee that she didn’t drink last night making my fist ball up as though it were around some object not to be lost. Morning, her face is all swollen up like she’s got an allergy, well, I suppose she does have an allergy but it’s not affecting her right now. Christ I am a routine only on different arterial roads in the west of the city, a routine of nailbiting (better to have a nailbiting routine, eh?) on the Unthank, the Dereham, the Earlham. People in this city talk about the arterial roads like people in proper cities talk about metro lines. At this precise moment in time I glance at the computer and remember the story saved in a sub/sub/sub directory about a flaneur sort of guy riding an invented underground in this city, “The Eastern Underground”, one I wrote when younger and overexcited by what the old lecturers had to say about excluded middles postmodern geographies and all that shit. Must I say I didn’t complete the story, I was ambitious then and couldn’t knock out a piece in ten minutes ‘cos I was always thinking of novels with black&white photos on the cover maybe of girls applying lipstick and powerstations in the twilight, it doesn’t pain me that I didn’t finish that particular work or the one about an island overrun with hotels or the Italian porno or the magical realist (hahahaha) one, only that I didn’t finish something, which is a chronic pain in the arse.

So, I have though about all of these things and she still hasn’t replied, so I say I was only joking about the routines.

Coffee’ll never come out of this fucking carpet, the fuck. Best to leave it because I decided that we had to go for a walk in the morning, another brilliant displacement activity, brilliant. You even get fit (6 years later). (tell a secret, I’m a hypocrite about the routines, real shit.)

But really I want to go for a walk ‘cos I want to see the monument again, in the graveyard inbetween the arterials I mentioned, I only saw it the once and it was on one of those brooding summer mornings where it’ll piss it down all day but you might get a reprieve if you get to work on time. It was a bold old thing, facing outwards, towering, classical not Christian.

So we take a walk up there and walk down the path which is completely covered in mud and leaves and dogshit.

There’s the monument, it’s facing inwards.

It’s not that big.

So to cut a long story short the monument in the graveyard moved, except it probably didn’t, and everything else I’ve mentioned is utterly superfluous. Maybe I should finish off those novels one day no fuck it you can do them.