car-ride no. 93752

I’m sitting in the car, on the way back from East Sussex and it’s dark so I can’t read. We’re singing songs, or bits and pieces of them, because the car stereo is fucked and it can’t play anything not even the radio.

Before we left you’d said, ‘you’re going to have to keep me entertained’.

So I’m curled up in my seat, watching the different shades of darkness and the red-orange-pink glow of lights in the distance. And I’m trying to remember a song. It starts with ‘if only’ but I can’t remember anything else. And I have a ghost of a tune running in my head, but when I try and catch it, it becomes another song.

And then I give up, and we start reciting bits of poems. You tell me a few lines of Robert Frost, and I tell you how much I dislike Blake. And then I tell you how I want to put chaos into 14 lines, and also how they have lied about time.

But most important of all, I told you about the vegetables and the birds, and about how words are for those with promises to keep.