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Lost for Geoff Cochrane
Dear Geoff, I’m sorry I gave you
the wrong instructions. Sometimes I just get like that all flustered, crazy Jane, can’t tell my arse from my elbow.
Go down Hereford as in the cow
Street, is that what I said? On to the corner with Colombo, then left into the Boulevard Saint Michel. Cross the road on the diagonal, that’s Hradebni. Then toddle past the Castello di Diavolo, where most of the poets hang out (you don’t have to go in if you don’t want to).
Whatever, I was wrong.
I’m sorry it took you three hours to get to the reading.
Do you remember that time
when we were all sitting in Fidels in Cuba Street, out the back inside the hessian tent with the smokers (it was the middle of winter). There was Gerry Melling and Lindsay Rabbitt and you and me. I was getting my weekly fix of nicotine.
The talk rang high and wild,
you drank a small bottle of Coke but you wouldn’t eat anything and after a while you started whining like a puppy, ‘my feet are fuckin’ freezing’ and we all looked down and there were these huge hairy holes in your old sneakers. ‘What the hell are you wearing?’ I dragged the edge of your left trouser leg up and there was the strip of a blue nylon sock. ‘For god’s sake, haven’t you got any other shoes?’ ‘I saw some I quite liked in the Farmers.’ ‘And did you buy them?’ ‘Does brown go with black and white?’ ‘What?’ ‘They were brown and white and black and I didn’t know if the colours matched.’ ‘Look, I’ll go with you to the Farmers, and we’ll buy the bloody shoes and I’ll buy you a pair of merino socks too as long as you promise to wear them.’
That’s how it goes some days,
don’t you reckon. You wander the streets of a city that’s no longer your own. You look at a map and all the words are in German. You ask a stranger where the hills have gone and he bursts out laughing.
You know I’m always happy
to meet you on the flooded steps n gr8 2 gt yr txt: ‘loved LOVED Christchurch’
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