Came around to my flat. Asked me if I had any songs.
I told him I wasn't in the mood.
Fuck your moods, he said.
And I believed him
back then.
A Polish man - a mountain -
in the middle of one of his schizophrenic episodes is something to be
feared, even when you laughed as he called you a lazy bastard.
He said, here's ten pieces of paper.
Write
me ten songs.
I wrote five.
Two of which my band would record.
He stormed out the door. Back
to his tall and wide canvases of naked angular women.
I let him think he'd left me feeling like shit.
A few days later
he was back.
Here's three pieces of paper. Give me three.
I gave him three.
He stormed out again, even though they were fine lyrics,
I thought.
Weeks passed and there was a knock at the door.
Let's start from scratch.
You're pissing me off, George Smith, I said.
In the space of an hour
I'd penned ten songs just to get rid of him.
I was 27. He was a drunken, Polish, schizophrenic artist.
He recorded all ten of them.
Not there back in Sydney, of course.
No. He returned to Krakow. Now that the system that had systemically
fractured his already frail health had come apart at the seams.
He sent me a letter, thanking me.
And that was that.
Jurek Kowal, if you're ever back down this way,
you owe me my ten songs,
No comments:
Post a Comment