Monolord

Every day the barristers come with faces sharp from leathered text and empty chequebooks, red from wine and the quayside air and underscored by bone structures designed to tear flesh and leaf. We share astronomical formulae in the contractions of the iris, we share the accounted aromas of the restaurant, we share a space.
I watch the single mind of the far clouds whilst absently polishing glasses and think about the conditions of my friends in turn. You who have had it tough, you in your tennis shoes and your velvet jacket, you with your porcine face and dramatic personas, you who said nice things to me, you with whom I watched the waters draw in at dusk, you the migrational, the pendulum, the fulcrum, the counterbalance, the dead and the unborn, you for whom I would do anything but can do nothing, you ignorant of the unsaid scope of affection, you for whom I came to make espressos after dark and could stay with until dawn.
I consider a photograph that could only be justified by the inclusion of a human element, a photograph of the humpbacked bridge descending upon functional steeples and fading to the empty tarmac car park where no children play. I become so engaged with the natural elements and the desire for a composition as to mistake a curl of air from the extraction fan to be a hand on my arm - your hand in fact.
Walking home I talk amiably to a drunk man ejected from a concert for cheering too loudly. When we part on divergent street corners I tell him that Kant was a midget who never left his hometown. He walks off shouting ‘Kant! Kant!’, his voice echoing on the considered walls of Northumberland Street and fading into the relentless spool loops of traffic lights, taxis and the subterranean metro somewhere not so far beneath our feet.