I slip and slide through my life, trying to get a grip
on the rail. I'm grasping in the dark for a switch
that'll turn on some almighty bright white light and
thus, illuminate the way, the path, make everything
clear as day. And every breath I take seems to be
quickly rolled up behind me and filed away in memory.
Only a particular scent or dose of weather can pinprick
the past and even then, the drawer opens flirtatiously
for just a moment.
I have lost touch with everyone I went to school with,
everyone in the village where I spent most of my
formulative years, everyone I went to college with,
everyone I ever worked with. They too, are filed away,
often angrily slamming the drawer behind them, over
something I said or something I didn't say.
My lovers cannot be traced. I know. I've tried. I've
taken trains to their cities and stood on street
corners in the miraculous off-chance that they might
wander by. But each time, I have returned home,
defeated and had to force myself to sleep so that my
heart didn't kill me.
I began my autobiography at 23 years old, with the
intention that I wouldn't live 'til 25. But I'd done
nothing, loved no-one, said nothing of any great
importance by that time. The journal of a disappointed
man.
I took a position at the Natural History Museum but
left after only 3 months due to allergies. Whilst
deluding myself that I could reinforce the scientist's
power of detached analysis with a poetic intensity, I
would cough up my guts on the glass that held the giant
stuffed man-o-war. I had a gift of incisive and candid
comment, but I failed to ignite it when faced with the
apple-cheeked Irish girl who served the tea in the
basement canteen. Drunk most nights, in the Black Swan
on Canal St, I would attempt to put my own complicated
nature under the microscope of a beer glass. I walked
home alone, opening the air with bolshy, slurred
dictums against religion, ethics, love and life itself.
Lonely, penniless, paralysed by the guilt of never
having told my father I loved him, I wander hospital
corridors, posing as a visitor. I have wept, enjoyed,
struggled and overcome but I remain disappointed.
