I am fifteen and five months.

I behave savagely.

But.

 

I’m so fucking fast. I’m using that word more and more now. My overbite hates shitty ethsses but loves to fuck. I skate boredly over the ruins of pre-adultic disappointment with Ben.

Our shoes are fucked.

Fucking Miss Davies thinks I’m copying stories out of some book and making up words.

I am.

The last.

In class,

we say a language is ours, yet we must not pry open the gaps in its case? We must not write on the rom? What flavour of batthit is that?

Do you want an apple?

Asks Ben.

Not right now. Probably never.

I return over stranger cars.

Over our good trucks.

We wrap and wound gravity.

I go along well mostly. My kickflips are neat enough. Very fine lands echo from the schoolfront wall.

Radical Haha!

Ben is with me where it matters. Just as good as me, bitten just as bad.

My honest friend leaves and I meander home happily.

Delightedly.

Welsh hillily.

Because I do like to go fast.

When it’s only my elbows, knees and chin.

Hell met absense.

No padding worn thin.

I go as fast as I can carrying as much as it makes sense to take along. Madness to risky trick at speed and weighted. Anything but simple elegance is concrete, arsephelt damage. Right now I cut a silouette of a fat chaffinch on a quick grippy stick; pack_laden with two long wheels, yawning with vangled struts twice through. A dismantled ideal of square stability that, if it sneezed no spring, could quite well count in me winning:

 

THE 1995 CAERWEDROS, LLWYNDAFYDD & NANTERNIS

LEEKER SOAP-BOX CUP

Sponsored by Leeker

“You’ll be right back after you take a Leeker!”

August 8th, Caerwedros Hall Field

Ages 9 – 16

“RECORD TURNOUT LAST YEAR!!!”

Cawl provided

 

Where I’m from, people are crazy. Mad as they come in hysterics. Leeker was an especially soft drink stocked and hocked exclusively in Ceredigion.

 

O Ceredigion.

Cold wet slab.

Of deepest.

Darkest.

Cymru.

You carbonated the leek,

bright bachgen, diolch!

– Trad

 

It’ll make your dick piss your cock off, this stuff, boyss.

The headmistriss,

Miss Côt-Siaced,

would say.

Her blunt chin,

awash with it.

Her husband ran,

whenever he could.

The Small Shop.

Sold it.

You would not believe the taste of it.

It is like drinking love itself.

Love Distilled.

Desire consumable.

Home.

Everyone knew.

Such terrible effects.

And they laughed.

Through the bouts.

And the family rot.

It came unbidden to all in pint milk bottles, unwashably yoghurt-acted films given free. Crisper projections developed on each reuse and decycle. Their thin plays gave glassy comfort as we left out the empties in molded green-beige calamities of ancient life.

Heavenly.

It would kill you all friendly.

All your life. And did.

Ceredigion was lawless.

Healthy boarderless,

and hid.

 

You could forget yourself in the ringed around layers of the liquid leek.

Forget you meant to be present.

Now,

I intend to win this box-car race, carrying as I am always this pack laden with two long wheels, yawning with vangled struts twice through twice. Additional stifled springs, good bearings found, lost, found. Heavy metal skating. Waiting.

I have visited the small library in Abreraeron. Read that they once made the best longbows from yew. Fine lengths of it whip along with me in the wind. I collect it all.

I need one axle.

To turn an anchor into water.

I have this diagram, you see,

with an empty line.

 

 

I am forty and eight months.

I behave well.

Hid.

 

So. I am so I suppose.

Safe so sub-city.

Stitching.

Smiling sounds.

Sewing stowing sowing.

Store’en shuring storing.

Storie Space Esploring.

Softly softly thwearing.

Still

,

no axle to bare me.

Everywhere with jagged metals;

a cumbersome diagonal mirror ribcage,

is never ever absent.

The worst imaginable derigible thought,

of a wish to go faster

.

After several none evenings,

comes:

One evening.

A recorded awarded wizard.

Speaks through speaker.

I,

the listener, crane.

He tells me:

 

 

Take one piece of paper the length you need.

Write on it anywhere:

“Axle”

Coil.

It’s.

Edge.

Then.

Twist it until you can’t.

Wring into it past-wood past-tree past-seed.

 

 

I do as softly ordered;

twisting until I can’t.

Until the paper thins from sight.

Looking now I find it there.

Quick-cooling warm.

An empty line.

 

New in new hands.

 

 

Stay fuck,

OXO