Rick Got Stabbed And Spent The Next Six Months In Hospital. I Met Him Two Years Afterwards On A Pier At Night.

"You write? What books? Magazines? Poetry?"

"Yes."

"Once I wrote a poem and read it to a mate who said he’d heard it before and I must have stolen it from a magazine or something so I threw it out. I must have heard it before and now I don’t remember any bit of it. I’d been on the cones, sitting with me old farm dog, Rhett here, good dog I think he likes you, and was looking into the sky and the trees, listening to the trout splashing in the almost darkness jumping for bugs like they do at that time of night. Be fucked what I wrote in my poem. It’s all lost now.”

"It’s okay because poems are in the wind."

"What?"

"And you grab at them from the wind like a trout would a nymph."

"Fuck. You just said something. I’m not trying to piss in your pocket or anything. But I think you just said something that’s true. Let me shake your hand. Shit. Hold on a second.... Yeah, you’re right. Let me shake your hand."