MILES TO GO

The new tenant lives the same floor as the laundry, before he moved in I came out the lift and there was, turned out I heard later, the dead body of a man by the door of what is now the new tenant's flat.
The flat is for junkies, that's all I've known live there.
The previous tenant woke one morning next to his girlfriend'd died during the night, the police investigated but no charges were brought, three months later the tenant died of liver failure when the cancer he knew would kill him eventually did. The Dead Sofas practiced in his front room, I couldn't hear them from my flat but he told me about them and the night they played at Mackies.
The new tenant feeds off the Hungry Ghosts queuing outside the Croft or from outside the canteen's fence he asks them, drinking coffee, cocktails, a pint or two, for spare change or a cigarette. His relationships are based on their capacity to gratify his needs and wants. It doesn't nourish him without product.
He limped out of the lift having said to his friend on the way up, 'Sometimes it seems to take longer than other times but I know it's the the same each time.' The limping, crutches, occasionally a wheelchair after amputation, when it's known to have been said, 'It's not a joke anymore.'
His friend said, 'Hmm,' watching the numbers.
The new tenant has miles to go.


WAIT FOR ME

...Stokes Croft, the people who wander the streets with anything left, wondering...headlines, films, the number of cars, public transport, bodily fluids in the lift, someone's friend staring at the wall...
she asks me things, makes suggestions, what we could do...when I got further than how I felt I understood why I was this side and not the other...
'I'll be fine,' she said when I dropped her off...lost minutes in the afternoon.
When she was back at the flat I asked what happened and said, 'I want to stand for election.'
'I won't vote for you,' she said, 'because you didn't wait for me.'