Miro - walk to the library...

He looked left crossing Partick Bridge, up to the university, through the silver beeches to the Victorian gothic miscreation. They had built a golden Palladian masterpiece in Edinburgh and Glasgow got this second rate, gloomy mock-religious pile of dirty stone. Miro loved it. He would be starting his first year up there in a few weeks.

He already had his reading list, had read it, and was working on his own list: Cocteau, Genet, Gide, Ginsberg, Rimbauld, De Sade,Verlaine. And then the rest – Beckett, Elliot, Hopkins, Joyce, Pound, Woolf. Perverts; early modern masters and a mistress.

Wilde can fuck off. We are beyond Wilde and his paradoxes.

Pacing it out now, past Kelvingrove Art Galleries. Folk said they had made a mistake and had built it facing the wrong way. It looked towards the university for comfort and solidarity, like two ugly sisters. They had built it the wrong way round and the architect had thrown himself of the roof. Or was it out a window?

Defenestrated… Discombobulated.

But that was a lie. The front was the front, the back was the back, and people tried to make a story out of that. Bored Glaswegians with more chat than sense. A blood-orange red building. Spanish looking.The leaves were beginning to fall on Kelvin Park Avenue. Yellow and green against the red of the galleries as he turned back to look at the tower where no one had ever jumped from, then back to the dying trees.Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie… Street lamps were hung from one side of the road to the next, large pendulous lampshades, battleship grey closed fuchsia heads, that couldn’t be found anywhere else in Glasgow. A pink fire sparked to life in their vacuum and lit the lime, jade and mauve coloured leaf-patterned road. They looked like lamps from a nazi death camp, Le fleur du Mal, and the road a road into the forest where people went but didn’t return.

It was up that road that Miro first felt the rush of disgust and fear and hate and sex. Men in wool raincoats with their shopping in bags at their feet, standing at the urinals taking too long to pee. And there was a smell in the air, not just stale piss and cigarette smoke, but dirt, filth. He sat in a tiled cubicle, squeezing out a perfect little truffle of shit from his perfect little arse as men tried to poke through the plugs of tracing paper-thin toilet roll that filled the peep holes in the sides of the stall. He got out of there quick. Fourteen and hard, his erection peeping out the top of his waistband, his hairless un-wiped arse twitching as he sprinted.

Filthy. Fucking… he had thought.

But something that was locked in his throat, heart and guts had drawn him there after he heard they went there. Fear and filth. It was all he deserved.

Poofters.