Poem 203

I travelled down to the Students’ Arts Festival in Christchurch 1979 and got billeted in a flat … the other flatmates weren’t keen on me and said I was sleeping in Warwick’s room since he was the one who’d taken the call and volunteered them to host someone … for the few nights I was there we’d both get in after midnight and talk before falling asleep … he lived a very different life to mine but I was struck I guess by a sense of his loneliness within the crowd …

Warwick

knew more dead people
than anyone I'd ever met
all his friends in bike and car accidents
parents while he was still young
grandparents later
even a tenant in one of his grandfather's flats
(as soon as they opened the door
he said you could smell it)

he told me how he was getting back into motocross
since he damaged his middle ear and couldn't
dive any more
he told me about all the hunting he used to do
and how he went disco dancing now
down at the Adam's Apple
he told me about the night he got cut up by these
three guys with razors and showed me the shirt
he'd been wearing its gashes
and dried blood
he told me how his flatmate's fiancee
came round once when he was the only one
home and next thing he knew
they were in bed together
he said he trusted me not to say anything about that

my last night sleeping on his bedroom floor
he came in and said he'd got
the whole club up doing the Manhattan Hustle
then walked off the dance floor 
in the middle of the song
to see what it looked like

I think of him like that
walking off turning back to look
somewhere upstairs in the dead
of the smoky autumn Christchurch night
nineteen ghosts on his slim shoulders