Image: TV PRESENTER WITH BROWN SHADES. Acrylic on Handmade Paper. 1985.

Thought I would stop preaching for a change and give you something to read. Paintings like the one above often give me ideas about the people in them. This is a prose poem I found in an old sketch book, based on an imaginary sunglasses salesman, a cool character, a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. 

THE SUNGLASSES SALESMAN.

The sunglasses salesman always had an answer to everything, he invariably varied very little, reliably consistent like a dripping tap, torturing the outer limits of your feeble consciousness with platitudes and stereotypical pearls of wisdom.

His clothes hung as if he was a walking closet, ever so slightly creased, they casually rested on his coat hanger shoulders, smelling of maturity and aftershave.His shoes were patently leather, his ties were loud, his shirts were masterpieces of minute texture, sun bleached, threaded with a hint of green. 

He walked on tip toes and talked in a creeping, low and languid, western way, he sat at tables outside sunshine cafes with lime and vodka in a fluted glass, seeing with small pupils which were never seen.

His flat was high above the raging city, with a picture window and a sliding door, his Le Corbusier chaise Longue lying like a black leather lover on the parquet floor. His Yves Klein paintings broke the awesome  stretches of his sterile, pure white virgin walls, and his suitcase sat in the uplit corner by an early Cocteau and a late Miro.

In his high tech heaven there are push button sensors and bleeping black computers and a TV wall, a CD compact stereo and a symphonic sound system, all sensory operated by his little toe. There were no distractions, just the lowest whirring of his laptop and the tuneful clicking of his electronic desktop, and the occasional bleeping of his wrist strapped organiser diving watch.

He was steeped in comfort which was utilitarily utopian, unassuming and yet faintly brash, paid for with plastic and never cash.