Fire man - an elegy

In memory of my friend, David Hugo,
Artist 1958 - 2012

I wish that I could talk to you

By text, email or Skype

Or, even better, travel by time machine

To our early experiments

With electricity and fire –

Primitive circuit boards, gunpowder

Then amplifiers and guitars

You were a pyrotechnician

A fire imp, a bellows man

Conducting an art room rebellion

We were the boys who liked prog

Van der Graaf Generator, Camel

And the brutal blues of the Groundhogs

The first gig I ever went to

We looked for a nutmeg high

Or euphoria from banana skins

Smoked rolled up leaves on the playing fields

I recall your big house by the park

Your garden. The kiln we built there

Your suburban alchemy by fire

We were mock-Tudor revolutionaries

We snagged our grammar school blazers

On the barbed wire and left them for dead

I remember your theatre troupe

And your odd brown dungarees

You were at art school when I

Was shackled to a desk

And then, you were in London

A pioneering urban bohemian

With your canal-side studio –

A giant art room all of your own

A muse to the Corporate man

You were still playing, still blowing things up

You showed me your sculptures

Strange homespun contraptions

The chair you built for Iron Maiden

Armatures of coloured patterns

Blizzards of molecular repetition

Like the décor in your flat

And your weird collages of sound

I realised that you were a genius

Your highs were real now

You wore leather trousers

Though they did not suit you

That year, ’97, you took me a club

A dark chemical labyrinth where

Alienated by metronomic sound

I cowered in the ‘chill-out room’–

A hallucinating fairground

You had abandoned me

Why were you so angry?

Your life seemed perfect

Wasn’t your art enough?

MDMA was your new alchemy

Perhaps I was jealous

I had sensed something dangerous

In your pharmacological obsession

Your next frontier –

The chemistry of the brain

Your were not fazed by any element

But fire was burning you up

Finally, only one element

Would quench you, fearless one

Later, with the skill and delicacy

Of one of your intricate machines
You apologised for leaving me
I forgave you. You sent me a CD –

Gentle Giant and Hawkwind

You were a model maker now

Ideal for you – a new art room

We still had ‘issues’

You see, I had never liked Van der Graaf Generator

Focus were my favourite band

You said that they were ‘cocktail jazz’

We fell out, like two schoolboys

Now, we’ll never fall in

I’ll never hear from you again

I’ll miss you, fire man