slide down them, go headfirst and flat on your stomachs, thumping surfboards riding on blunt waves of tread, riser and nosing— it doesn’t matter, never has, if they are carpeted or bare-board or fire escapes— hammer at them with your arses, rodeo, bucking bronco, hiccupping, falsetto— if you must, and you will have to, go up them, upstairs, as geckos might, as birds with broken wings must (with ramshackle tics and flurries) or climb like you’ve hundredweight boots on your feet (mountainous trudging) or do the rodeo/bronco thing backwards, reverse cowgirl (cowboy) (cow-genderless [an aside— sex seems to complicate stuff, yet no stuff is ever sexless— discuss in 20 objects or less] [or more], more or less )— but never shy or undermine the splendour of the normal, walk up or walk down them, stairs are process (of getting somewhere) (above or below)— pause midway, sit, grandstand, in suspense, in between a here and a there, stare (sightless with thought)(thoughtful with sight), spying through the bannisters or sandwiched by walls (reassuring, cool against your cheek), halfway (present), pivotal to past/to the future (you fulcrums) playful with being as children.

most of it let slide— for it never, not ever, not really, never certainly, slips away from you— once thought, it resides (made real, a something), retrievable. thought of/about (head-spoken) (or said out loud), it ghosts, comes back to knock and to rattle around you— most often it’s an unwanted haunting (you might [not that you should] devise a form of exorcism— some ceremonial mode of critical self-appraisal [say boo to a goose]— note: self-abuse is another fellow’s lovemaking (the art world like the whole world— you already know—is lively with wankers ( mutual masturbators), but art is a peepshow— so what can you do?) slide—the playground slide challenges you to climb it (doesn’t it)(must have once, even if it doesn’t now that you’re so mature) (you remember the running on the spot of your ascent)(the faintest grip of plimsoles on highly polished steel, the little nubs of surefooted-ness that assisted in your conquest of that fleet slant sheet)— stuff gets done— stuff gets done— life is all accomplishment (the abandonment of the abandon of sleep, the getting to all those necessities of surely unnecessary place, holding your head up/in your hands/straight, etcetera)—living is an achievement— if art and life are one, you can’t lose, you’ve won [erm. worst rhyming ever. but i let it slide. it’s more of a Casper than a poltergeist— the second worst rhyming ever]. let it slide. let it be.

the minute yawn of a pore in the skin of something is there to be filled. the scruff bank that shoulders or corridors a rail track is barely occupied by the daydreams of passengers and fly-tipped stuff and wild flowers-and-grasses. the margins of any text (a text of urban/suburban/commercial/rural architectural sprawl/upheaval/splendour, the text of a love affair, the text of a politician’s open mouth, of a slug’s slick passage along a pavement, of the trees beating against trees on trees in the mosh pit of a high wind) are vacancies. all space is headspace. we blow space like bubblegum into balloons of encompassing with our breathing. space isn’t ever in short supply—it will seem it is—the whole concrete otherness of all that’s out there will close-in and it will make you feel tightly (screw tightly) confined—there are no restrictions, no lack of room (stuff abides wherever), there’s no diminishment you cannot jemmy open. space is what you’ve got. it’s between your ears. throughout your fingers. where your eyes live, live out, even in the dark. (darkness is one of the vast realms you can travel)(undoing is another—undoing— taking an eraser to something, putting right a wrong, or unpicking, or undressing.) there is play in everything and everywhere—fulfill it, occupy it, leave it empty with a sign in its window reading ‘vacancy’. space is what there is and what can be done. what is and what will be. space—the final frontier, jeux sans frontières. [stair / slide / space]