i can **** a bottle of wine out no problem, with beer i tend to knot my stomach tight with beer acting like spaghetti - the other superpower carbohydrate; yesterday i met my first suicide, standing on my nightly route, a young boy, “depressed,” just staring at a phone screen, we exchanged a few pleasantries (who you with? no one, just me. who you with? beer), i climb over the footpath fence, knock off something that’s perched there, it’s his, i apologise, but he doesn’t mind, so i ask again, no, it’s ok, a good night i say, clear skies, plenty of stars, he apathetically drifts with the words - like a canadian flag in the hands of an american patriot - we part, away in the distance, past the horse field i saw a morse code signal of the suicide kid’s phone flashing, i have no clue whether he thought he was alone in this little patch of countryside wilderness. all i know, upon encounter, is just that eerie feel of it all - and if i was to theorise that eeriness, i’d simply write: at least systematise those thoughts, you can’t censor them! honestly, i feel like i’m engels in the victorian factories with these mental health services of england - it’s not exactly communism that’s around the corner this time, but where will this existential experiment take place if the ****** one took off in the mongolian buffer before boomeranging back? i’m going to bet on red 32 - china - because of the one-child state policy.*

i drink wine so cheap i either have to add sugar to it,
or drink it as kalimotxo,
but at three quid a bottle it’s a bargain and a barrel too;
but the wine i make once a year
(12 bottles by my last count)
is much better, a full bodied essex vintage,
that i can drink straight,
but i drink it within a week,
which makes me wonder - if man was still
attached to nature with the seasonal consistency...
would a little word beginning with al-           lism?
never mind, i know that we wouldn’t be eating
watery strawberries from spain in winter.