Days Volume Two

* Well the moon is broken And the sky is cracked Come on up to the house The only things that you can see Is all that you lack Come on up to the house All your cryin don't do no good Come on up to the house Come down off the cross We can use the wood Come on up to the house CHORUS Come on up to the house Come on up to the house The world is not my home I'm just a passin' thru Come on up to the house There's no light in the tunnel No irons in the fire Come on up to the house And your singin lead soprano In a junkman's choir You gotta come on up to the house Does life seem nasty, brutish and short Come on up to the house The seas are stormy And you can't find no port Come on up to the house There's nothin in the world (Chorus) there's nothin in the world that you can do you gotta come on up to the house and you been whipped by the forces that are inside you come on up to the house well you're high on top of

* So he knelt down on Patpong before the monk, with the two go go boys by his side, there between Super Girls and Super Pussy, and thought: it doesn't get much more dislocated than this. He had sought strange experiences and ended up in the company of rent boys. Not that they weren't good company. They often were. He fought through the thickening fog, the strange curtains, strange branch like structures beating on his face as he ran; and to think he had paid for this experience. Darkness wasn't here, it was more like a shattering ethereal light, painful it was so bright. So completely abandoned, so completely departed from his old life, he watched with a certain fascination as the falang, the foreigner, sat in the corner of Hot Male Station and made various proffers on the boys; 1,000 baht he began at, Aek, I like, no, sorry, I have boyfriend, Mr Yung, too trisy, Mr Tong, no, I don't take customer, and settling on a butch little boy, well butch by Thai standards but

* So somewhere between Super Girls and Super Pussy on Patpong they knelt down before the monk and handed over their offerings, he and the two Thai boys, his sleeping companion and his friend, because no Thai came alone. Everyone know he is too crazy to have a relationship with, drink too much whisky, too many girls. Everyone but him. And even as these stale thoughts ricocheted around his aging head, he was with different company now. I have a new boy now, the words falling on muffled air, despite the phone line. He couldn't help thinking, as they headed towards Surawong, what are the chances of seeing him again. How would they react. This is my new friend. The introductions. As if any of this tired, obsessional thought mattered. They knelt, there in the tattered streets, before the monk, it being a period of Buddhist holidays, and were prayed over. All the time, thoughts disappearing like flocks of pigeons up through the shambolic houses, up past shuttered windows and closed roo

* The birds tweeted their early morning sounds. You look tired, Peter said, to which he responded: yes, I'm tired of cheating death. It was only last year when the doctor measured his blood pressure and said: you are about to have a heart attack. I don't know whether to send you straight to hospital or not. In the end the medication worked. But now he was being treated for hypertension; an appropriate enough sounding illness. Getting old sucks, that's all he could think. Human. Divine. Damaged goods. Travelling, and falling into the liquid desire, the furnace of all things possible, keeping up the medication for something he didn't want to have seemed a far off priority, and while they, his passing companions in this fundamental, impossible to maintain disregard, might have been shocked at the sight of the old man puffing on cigarettes and displaying such careless contempt for his own health, nothing could be sustained. It didn't seem fair that now he was not dri

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* She was always there, at three or four in the morning in Sydney's first 24-hour coffee shop, Una's, ready to sober him up with black coffee and ice cream. She was always, for some strange reason, supportive of him; of his dreams to finish high school and go to university, unlikely prospects for a drunken 16-year-old on the streets of a red light district; such as it was. Perhaps it was the cast of characters that drew him there more than anything; Peter, the male prostitute, in a town short of male prostitutes, always changing his hair colour, always funny, full of pretence, full of the dark lords and throw away lines. Boasting about numbers. As if anyone cared how often he hocked his box. The drag queens that clustered there. The easy speed, in the days when if you knew, as of course he did, the right chemist to go to you could buy the highest pharmaceutical grade straight across the counter. Sometimes he would wander down there from his job as a copy kid on the Daily Tel

* Swamps and flying things; restless, spikes reaching up and gone, strange insects. He was not from here, that was all there was to it. These voices, these landscapes, spoke of a home of origin, a planet of origin, a very great distance away. We are all travellers, someone said, but it simply wasn't true. Most of the people here were born here, would die here; or lived their entire lives within the confines of a village; and were entirely happy, fulfilled, their days full of laughter and gossip, lazy, indolent afternoons, jokes, easy love. I am very sorry not to sleep with you tonight. How deeply he misread situations. How misplaced were his loyalties. He could be sure of only one thing: here was the day, here was the tranquillity that had always escaped him. The boy, more like a hot water bottle than a sex worker, slept through the nights and busied himself in the morning. When he went out he re-arranged the apartment, like any girl. He was pleased. He didn't have a domesti

* There were rivulets of something resembling peace, there in the ether, with far-off the canyons and other places. He didn't remember the things he thought he would remember all his life. You were probably in black out most of the time I was talking to you, Peter said, the difference is remarkable. Well maybe so; he didn't know, he put his medallions aside and thought, said in fact, only half in jest: no wonder they call this the millionaire's meeting, you really are the women who lunch. Sandy had just declared she couldn't possibly go to the movies to see Inception because she would be in Shanghai for the World Fair. What a life these people led; indeed most everybody he met had a story to tell, living in Bangkok, posted, departed, returned, abandoned. There was Robbie, adopted as a young boy by an American couple in Seattle; drunk now, judging by the look of him, for a very long time; and having said these things, could he think any different; when they went to Sw