by Tom Conoboy

Every day I am renewed. Chilled water and talk and smoke, revivification, it's like scraping a tunnel through the mists of death and opening into the bright expanse of life. I was dead, now I am reborn.

All was silence, now is thunder. It is the time, time to jump off and begin. The world starts today.

It's not that I'm saying what went before doesn't matter. It does, to somebody, somewhere, for some reason. If I choose to forget, it's not out of ingratitude or indifference. It's just that, frankly, who cares what I said or did the day before today? That was a different person: I've died three hundred times since then and I'm smarter for that.

Every day I grow a little smarter, every death leads to new discoveries, every new me is better than the old one. I'm in the vanguard, the new new, anticipating the dance.

And when I'm under soil, as one day I must, I will look back on these days of discovery and my history may be read as though through the columns of newspapers, chronicling each day with a different headline, a different photograph, different leader comment. Have a go, hero! P.C. Down! A whole lifetime of them, a litany, an album. That one there, with the hard expression, that was the day I believed in Marx; that one, ludicrous with a skinhead, was when I was thought discipline was the answer; that one, smiling on Brighton Beach, was when I was free, in love, when anarchy flowed in my blood. Changing moods and memories, the seasons of a life spent in fleeting moments.

Sometimes it feels so fleeting it's obscene.

Sometimes it seems longer than the darkness of Hell.

John McCann, sad man, sometimes happy; sometimes sad.

Somewhere in the penumbra of history there is, too, a family, three boys, Shane, Mark and Ivan. A wife once, Susan, and happy families in happy holidays by the coast. Phew, what a scorcher! Slap on the slap!

Those were different days, though; we didn't know about global warming or climate change or the things that screw us up without us seeing them. Sleepwalking to disaster! Don't touch that bottle!

When I wake up every morning, somewhere in the clouds, I inhale like a smoker taking his first fix. I open my eyes and see the blue. I hear the wind.

There's a road in my mind, a road I've never seen but whose every pothole and bend and slope is known to me like the contours of the body of my lover. Susan, love, Susan. The road winds uphill and I think it goes to Heaven.

One, two, three, four, move your body off the floor, five, six, seven, eight, lift your legs and shift that weight.

The lump that is me wakes up to the day that is new and shifts, prepares to twist and turn. Paralysed! He'll never walk again!

Well, it's true, I don't walk, but I can sing. I don't run but I gave up hiding. I reach out and remember the length of Susan's warm and gentle body lying next to mine and memory is enough.

I wait until the numbness fades and I start to move, and the new day, the new life, starts all over again. And in the kitchen I see water, purest water, clear with the particles of life, all the liquid that sustains me. Drink two litres of water a day!

Stay away, John, stay awake. Drunken hero - two bottles of vodka for breakfast! Don't see me, John, don't speak to me, keep away from the children. Prohibition order. Slippy slopes and broken bottles, frozen memories, forgotten days.

Those were the days before I was reborn, when I thought standing tall meant standing up.

Now I'm waiting for the world to waltz, and when it does, I'm going to waltz with it.

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