Maggies Farm...

SURVEILLANCE
I live on the twenty second floor.
Harry has the flat downstairs.
When I first moved here Harry said:
When two ants are doing it,
in the crack on the concrete car park,
down there man.
It sounds like Madonna in the back of
a stretch limo making out on Avenue B
with a Puerto Rican kid called Jose.
Harry wasn't wrong, even the passing traffic
sounds sexy from the twenty second floor.

I invited Natasha up for the weekend last month,
Harry fell off the step ladder when she came
and broke his leg. He won't be doing Callanetics,
naked for a while, in front of that six foot mirror
with his head phones on, tuned into the Bob Dylan
tapes I've been playing to the bug he stuck in my
bedroom lightswitch last year when I went to Butlins.

I know what Harry gets up to because I've got a
fibre optic lens, poking through the hole I drilled
in his ceiling rose when the gas man was due and
he had to turn the meter over in a hurry.

Everybody says that fifty per cent of Harry's head
went walkabout in Katmandu about five years
before anybody met him. Nobody knows what
happened to the other half of his brain.

Last time I saw Harry, he had his left leg in
plaster, a skateboard superglued to his bare right
foot and a crutch under one arm. In his free hand
he carried a walking stick for locating ants to
colonise the concrete crack. He'd just totalled his
Giro on two little pills that he hoped would make
him think that he could fly.

I said: What are you going to do with that bargain
bucket of Kentucky you've got gripped between
your teeth?
Harry said: I'm going to take it home and dissect it
man. It's got to last me all week, so I'm going to
stirfry it up with those bean shoots I grow with my
Herb in the window box.
I said: That sounds good.
And do you know what Harry said?
He said: I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more!
SALFORD 1992