Pops

You got your belt buckled? Yes.
And what else? Mind your father

Always a lesson with a smile and nod
hands cracked from years of trade
car engine runs but not so good
bank account empty, but did what he could
Trips to New York City, baseball games and such
Picking fights with small town thugs

Boy, turned to man, turned to dad turned to pops
Loving endlessly, a war hero never stops
As breath grew short, and hairs sprouted array
We sang jovially on his 90th birthday
Sing soft, sing sweet, one day again we'll meet
Right after Gram has a few words with you.

Chips and dip, and scramble eggs
sleepovers and stocking legs
I remember all the moments as if they were yesterday
With my umpires you always had your say
I wrote this on arm so you never go away
may the road rise to meet you..we pray.

Weightlessness

There isn't a cure for the common cold, like the common heartache that pushes at our ventricles like an unstoppable rebel force. A simple song comes on with vague and flaccid lyrics and you're drenched with emotion - a child could have written it but it pulls at every violin string of your gut. They're two in the same, you're living but weakened.

Gypsy singer, witching speaker, tell me how to live in this beast. The world it keeps on spinning and and I'm hanging on its axis - which way is north..if I am always falling down?

The drinks never end and the drugs are superfluous. We hate them til we love them and the party never dies..until we do. Tip toeing on the diving board a meter from the water, can it keep us cool? After all we are cool aren't we? Bring me to the blue part, dip me in the pretentious glass sea. I want to feel weightlessness... chlorine dripping from my pours. I've got 20 tons of pressure pushing me down but my pussy foot wont let me slip from the edge.

The streets are empty with a virus that cannot sleep, the public cannot cope and McDonalds is closing doors. Cycle lanes are empty and Im careening through the universe its axis on a tilt, I'm guiltless and free like the dopamine dreams. Catch me if you can DiCaprio, I ran a red light with a green walk sign and an old lady winks while a parachute by...bye grandma. But in this environment where everyone feels stuck, trapped,  like Stockholm syndrome, Im buzzing like a bee, Muhammad Lee. The streets are empty with a virus that cannot sleep, I forget to signal right and Im hit by an empty TFL bus running a red light. At least the virus wont spread.

American Boy

Take the breath from my lungs as long as you use it wisely. Im hanging by a thread like the film real of a flimsy TV reel. Dim the lights down low and let its stream, Im like netflix in a dream, prime in a box.

Thanks for the information this morning. It was enlightening. Did you feel the American flag drip down you lips, did it feel good to let it burn me? I feel wiser for the knowing, more sad for the hopeful head that thought it twisted my stomach in knots. You win. Are you happier? Only a month we been apart - lyrics dance like a wedding song on mute. You're my new apocalypse, innately frustrated by the state of the art heart attack you drip into my veins. Needle-less to say Im at a loss of words, I can't type back as you hyperventilate about the distaste that lingers like something in your teeth on a night out. Toothpick digs and flossing only seems to scratch the surface as it lingers like a bee sting.

Hold the door, Im coming out and the sun is burning my Irish face. Freckles hide the sadness that awaits my Sunday slumber party for 1 and Im Jack's sleepless head. Nonchalantly flirting with the thought to sleep with a stranger and dance with danger going in without a thought. Thanks for the memories.

It may rain...

I watched you walk away today with the most cumbrous of hearts. The kitchen was clean just like the closets of every last piece that once called this 680 sq ft home. Desolation drenched in delusions of grandeur that we could make it through, that I could change the person that I have a become. It's not a monster dipped in malice but a malicious mind overpowering an off-beating heart longing for love.

Wish I could temper my emotions, find calm in being alone - a result that only I propagated. Looking across the wooden floorboards hopeful to abate the stalemate battle between me crying and walking the streets with lightness. Standing flightless, and feckless. "You did this mate, get off the sorrow bench and pull the rope from around your neck." The coarse knots pull at the skin that once held a man together, beautiful and strong. And now, you ask the twine to rip the life from everyone it knows. "Selfish fuck, don't look up to the sky asking how to recover." Don't tip the bottle back like all the times before. As the morning dew settles the whiskey hits your lungs with no calm, only igniting the hunt for the liquor, thicker than the clotted blood in your veins. Losing battle grounds created by lies like betrayed King Henry's Court driving France to burn.

Enter the chapter of another disaster if I continue on this path. Look back and laugh if I can surpass.

Crippling you and stealing days of breath is all that I can recall. Turning into what I always thought I would using a flaw as a cute, helpless hook to draw people in. Its not cute, its not fun, its hurtful and drawing Dorian Grey over and over again doesn't make the paint not crumble.

"It may rain, it may not...but if it does rain how much will you allow that to impact your life...thats anxiety, its a fear and if you let the fear win you will always fight against it and lose...moreover you will forget to live."

Look back at this and laugh...if not laugh smile because tomorrows not promised, only offered. 

Eye Contact

Its dinnertime and I am so acutely in touch with my senses. I can feel the pulse of her eye contact. Can see the flutter in the blink, the lubrication that coats her corneas. Her lashes touch and drag against each other until their inevitable pull, the top lash...the only part of the body that seems unrestricted from the burdens of gravity. Hold. Don't let go of this parasitic grip that trips up the beat of my aortic fixation.

Contact lenses dress the tension of the 40ft gap. Im counting crows because I think she's "looking at you man" but its my inner gut and lapse of egotism that forgets I'm the best. Why should her eyes turn anywhere else? After all I'm on the back of the ball staring into her brain. What does she want?

Synapses void of time lapses stretches through the cerebral universe where I'd like to live. Give me a year, a week, a day - give me a note within her Beethoven symphony so I can play the matching tone. Eye contact is not enough, I'm burning for a touch like doctors lust to get a little closer. I am rapacious. It is embarrassing and all consuming. Im a festering maggot feasting on her lack of focus.

All this breaks in a second of fate and I cant take the mistake of looking again. She picks up her Virginia Slim, presses it against her lips, and she gone like a ship in the night. An overture of silence takes over. I'm the lonely man on a one-night stand and that beauty wasn't built for me. But, I was meant to see vile denial of another being who will never again catch my eye. Im Dantes hidden away making friends with a man full of treasures at the bar. Jesus Christo, monte christ I can't count the time any longer. Just give me one more second of eye contact and I am sure I can cure the world of loveless sight.

"Bye," she says.

Closing Time for a Salesman

By the time 11am rolls around the following would have happened; Pre-workout drink with caffeine, glutamine, creatine, sugar. Cup of earl grey tea. 2 pills of vitamin b-12, orange, banana, grapes, another B12 before meeting starts. At this point the body is functioning on fuel. All fuel does to a car Is make it run, and at this juncture the body doesn’t start with an empty fuel chamber, the mind doesn’t react. It's a necessary routine, an arbitrary necessity. 

The sales cycle is like the morning routine. There is a need to jumpstart strong to avoid ambulance chasing at the end of the quarter. You start fully charged, ambitious for the early close, the larger booking, like the dose of amphetamine that makes your scalp itch like lice. When the money doesn’t come you search for blame and digression from fear only to choke on another presentation driving nonsense to the core. But we love it! The chase, the fight, the hunger..like the victory of a first fuck or a long drink at 7pm in your Eames chair.

And when a quota is met or lost you take it like a a shield, and wear it for better or worse. Since the only measure of a man or woman on the pitch is how they do in their last ballet, their most recent quarter, a tumbling dance for the overachiever. Numbers held over our head like a hanging kerosene lamp, but we’re the ones that fill it up. We keep it burning since without its glow there is no rush for the win, for when the wick disintegrates we know our time is done.

Pass me the big one, mate, pass me the jar. Let me fill it up with the pound notes and sterling that will make the people happy. Make the dress shoes sharper and the blazers more fitted, until we’re wearing worn clothes like the blind  beggar of Whitechapel. Stop the car, Im getting out – it’s a monkey factory in here and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Enter the death of a salesman, the poetic conquest gone wrong in a world of sharks and critics. Verbose metabolism violently fades with age, like the vacuous attempt at learning a new trait. Bitter to the core and unable to appease with uniformed non conformity; the younger beast emerges from the shadow to take the lead over the formerly dapper associate. In this little microcosm, I’m on top right now, but who is coming in next?

Ask

Everyone always asks how wonderful it is to live abroad. How exciting it is to move seamlessly through countries and cultures like backpacker on a mission. How many new people you meet, how many languages your translate to knowledge, and all the vociferous food flavours to decipher. They may ask about the two-story loft and the many posted photos painting a canvas for happiness. And while i can revel in that and feel the joy of experience permeating through my veins, I toil with the loss and distance.

I don't often get questions like how is it missing your youngest brothers senior night, probably because high school graduation is a simple milestone here, and its not even called high school. I don't get asked about missing the smells of my grandfathers house which somehow still has the remnants of my late grandmothers pasta sauce lifting up like backdraft against the walls. I don't get asked about the 72 track meets I've missed my siblings run, or the updates on my fathers blood pressure regularly. I don't get asked how it feels to know last when a loved one in family has 4months left to live with the best cancer treatment available.

Its not likely Ill get asked what the weather is like in fahrenheit or how many dollars it costs a month for my "cell bill." Its all centigrade and mobile, British slang and rhetoric. It's probably why no one asks what my mom does when the lake freezes over and the boats are put away and how she still cares for our dog like he was a puppy, he isn't. I don't get asked how the treatment on my grams health or when she'll play tennis again. Miles are replaced with km, inches with cm, 12hr clocks with military time, and piece of shit "all-in-one" washer dryers replace the old fashioned efficiently operating separated stack. Integrated appliances are complicated to repair and operate landlord say, well so is integrating into another culture.

Life inevitably keeps moving forward. Life is a force just like Newton predicted in 1666; in motion until we decide to slow it down, and sometimes its out of our hands. The mass of our livelihood, need for financial stability, friends and everyday changes keeps the acceleration high, and force us to adapt without thinking of the consequences.

Sometimes we need the people close to us to help us to depress the motion, or elegantly soften the burden of all the external pressures. Its no surprise that the further you are from home the fewer strong ties you have and the ropes that bind those relationship resemble shoe strings as opposed to tug of war chains. It's not about the ability to change the decisions that have been made and the distance from all that I love, but more the recognition that the feeling of missing is omnipresent. 

I don't know when I'll move back home, and lately its hard to determine where home is; London, US, row 8 on Ryan Air, Hamburg, Madrid, Milan, or Zurich. I've found unprecedented love here and undesired longing for home packaged together in a mixed emotional bouquet. I used to be so sure. But, I live for another day and as the equation of life continues to compute I know that the people I love, and whom love me, live. 

(in dedication to Wendy Loness, Day 1 of Chemo treatment)