The world is fast and reckless
Like a stampede of beasts and
Teenage ***.
We traded smog
For the roar of the city and
I am then reminded of my mobile life
Before atrophy set like plaster
In my bones.
Similarly, I lived above a bar,
And the roar of the crowds
Was compensated for
By the free drinks I would receive
To placate me,
To deafen me.
I remember heading out to the office
Already half-cut
Even before the banks had opened.
I remember everybody walking,
Not because the roads were too crammed,
But because it was so.
It was so, it was so,
And now that excuse is just not good enough
Anymore.
Neither am I.
I still walk the streets
And stop by outside windows.
It takes me a little longer these days
To read the signs and labels,
The mating rituals of the merchants;
Buy me, buy me, buy me!
They remind me of the girls I see these days,
The ones who live in semi-agony,
Lactic acid in their muscles and
A lack of sugar in their blood.
The way they walk so consciously nonchalant,
Impostered hair dragging in the wind,
Just living for the double takes
As they pass the men in the streets.
Nobody courts anymore.
Hands are held far too easily
And intimacy seems to me to have become
Just another commodity.
I remember my sweetheart.
The years we lived in absences,
Sleeping between lies and compromises
And lying awake at night,
Our bodies spent as our cheeks sunk into our pillows.
Our eyes staring past the darkness of the room
And beyond to something, somewhere,
Far from where we found our lives had laid.
I remember her so well, my dear coffee bean.
How desperate the years were
When we were apart,
Living out our lives and
Exchanging platitudes for company
In our loveless marriages.
I remember how bitterly disappointed I was,
To be bounded to the forever decreasing circles
I had to move within each day.
And I remember, so exquisitely remember,
The day I broke from them.
And we met.
We met over letters,
Recited by our eyes and written by the hands
Of our desires. Oh, the saliva of the stamp
Bringing us to a closeness
That was unbounded by geography.
These days,
Nobody understands the thrill of the postbox
And the dependent trust
You had to invest into the postman.
Nobody.
The welcome mat is now nothing
But a place to wipe the **** from your shoes
And to kick the bills away
From your footfalls.
It was once a pigeon hole,
An inbox and a faceless meeting point
For all of your dearest allies.
How I recall the excitement of the morning,
My sleep thinned to prepare for the slap of papers
And the return of my silent darling’s words.
Yes, today that has all gone
And so has she.
How I miss you, my dear
And the snort of your laughter.
How I miss counting out your imperfections;
Each another reason to love you
And to love you more.
Now that you are gone my darling,
My life is little more than an emptied school
In the endless weeks of summer.
I lie in wait, coffee bean,
For each time you appear, a phantasm
In my day. I wait for those special moments
Where I assume you will be sitting there,
Ageing with irrefutable brilliance
In the chair you so stubbornly frequented
Every day of our retirement.
I’ll take the hit that comes with it.
I’ll accept the come-down
When I enter the room
And realise
That you are even less than a ghost,
A passing thought
That decays instantly in the air.
And the air darling,
The air is filled with noise in these streets.
Do you remember when you and I would stop
And listen to the busker by the bridge?
I do.
I think he is gone too now,
Though sometimes I still hear his music
As I pass above the river.
Now, I live on in near-silence.
It has been weeks since I last spoke to somebody
Who did not rush me through my sentences.
And so I’m learning the patterns of today
And instead bow my sad head
And just pay up for my goods.
I avoid home mostly.
It is okay once I am inside it,
But it is the returning that I am afraid of.
So I mostly walk the streets,
The same route each day,
Until darkness or hunger delivers me,
Confused at my door.
I stumble lethargically to the television set,
The one we bought together for our first apartment,
Do you remember?
I turn it on quickly to **** the breathless silence.
Now, whenever I do get to talk to somebody,
I feel my eyes blur to tears
For some inexplicable reason.
Oh! The ache in my guts
How often I must swallow panic
And all of those pills that do not work.
Instead they just fog my mind
And distort all of the anchors
And features in my life.
Even the television will shout at me.
Everything I watch is an advert,
And the news is getting uglier with each day.
Sometimes I will turn on the radio,
But music isn’t music anymore.
And so I’ve learnt to read above
The din of gameshows and the gunshots
From dramas full of anger and devoid
Of love.
I’ve learnt to read again,
As we did together in the warmth
Of the crackles that interceded
The crooners that used to play through the grooves
That my life is once again set between.
At times I feel I am the only reader left in the world.
That all authors write for myself,
Vying for my attentions.
Nobody reads anymore.
Though the depravity between us
Made our love all the more sublime,
I must admit I regret those absent, wasted years.
How wonderful it would be now,
To see your features mixed with mine
And hidden behind the faces of our children.
I would give all that I am,
Which admittedly is not much anymore,
To be able to see the pigments in your eyes
Again, in whichever form they took.
How I would kiss our daughter’s hands
If they resembled your’s.
How I would weep into the shoulders of our son,
If he resembled your heart.
And so now my darling,
I wander these thoughtless paths like a machine.
And though I look out at the opulence
Of the city streets, I am instead
Just walking through a memory,
Or some old doctored flicker show,
Where I cut out all of the ugliness
And leave just us.