Departure lounge. Crown of tears probably dried upon my father’s shoulder. One year before I touch down again. Everyone will expect some change.
Tried to swallow consciousness on the Bangkok streets. Too much heat. There is no familiar face – I cannot even read the road-signs. There is no culture shock: I had lived with that my entire life.
Made friends with the strays for we had a common place. Caught in no man’s land: a need for hunger, some awful drive to be free.
Left Bangkok for the coast. New faces to hear old stories. Born new, kissed each night on the mouth, shared a hotel room for the month; relinquished every memory
in a flood of beer, old tears, the reservoir to cleanse ourselves of doubt. Dictated each depression
to a room full of strangers until I could frame every disgrace, put them to bed until I slept full and new.
Fell in love with a singer, red hair and a voice that climbed a ladder to heaven. Bid farewell in a country of mourning,
wore black until I found colour again. Descended each rung until I found that rock bottom was still much higher than where I had come from.
Wrote poetry and songs nine hours from the foundations I had built upon. Black-eyed and clueless, wrong side of the classroom,
I tried to teach a foreign tongue in a place where I knew nothing and no one. Far from every addiction that once anchored me in place,
I shaved my face, pressed my shirt, made amends for every cigarette end that once painted the frame of all I had amounted, all I had done.
Fell in love with a town, a pink sunset, stretch of rice-farms and apple trees that patterned the view of all I could see.
Still broken, still maladjusted, still craving those twisted words. Take my motorbike off into the drumlins each time that I fear the worst.
Still broken, still singing a song I cannot sing, yet each muffled string, each half-worn verse is a half-formed reason to rehearse the melody I gather each fateful, live-long day,