The New City

{The New City}

I found myself in the new city, trying to make my old home a distant memory. A place to be forgotten and never remembered. One day I hope to be able to say what happened there. To talk about the people I knew and all their craziness. To tell you about the cold concrete streets that haunt my dreams, but for now it is all still too close, still too real. I have heard it said ‘that time heals all’ and if that is the case (which I hope it is) not enough time has passed to heal the wounds that I carry day to day. Walking past me on the street you would not know I was wounded, but that is the way of the world, to be unaware of each others pain.

{The People}

No one spoke my language in the new city. Communication was hard. Language had to be substituted for strange hand gestures and facial expressions. Though these only helped me get so far. I would often listen to people talk the foreign language. Watch their lips move. Take in the gestures they made with their hands and faces. I would try work out what they were saying. Attempt to work out how they felt. With some people it was easy. Others remained a mystery. It was to them I was drawn. Did they hide their emotions so well? Or was I just blind to them? I did not know, but I loved to watch. Knowing no one in the city meant I had become an observer. Watching all. Talking to no one. Writing observations in my ledger. Random poems and sudden thoughts. I tried to capture existence in a sentence. Describe the loneliness of being. State the Σdifference in me from all of them, but in truth I was only fooling myself. I was not separate to the mass. Only part of it. Indistinguishable. A particle in a much larger whole.

{The Streets}

The Sun beats down on the concrete. How I love its warmth.
I wrote this poem in my ledger two days after arriving in the new city. It was the height of summer and my bank account was in rather good shape. Actually it had never looked so good. (So much so that I glued the bank balance in my ledger before I left the old city) Tired with convention I chose to spend my nights on the street. I knew my mother would not have approved, nor my father, nor the general public, but it did not seem so bad to me. Nothing would happen I was sure of it and nothing did. Apart from an incident one evening when a group of teenagers decided to prod me with sticks until I awoke. They were laughing drunkenly and talking to one another in slurred voices.
Leave me alone, I screamed, shaking my arms violently in the air. They quickly ran away still laughing and yelling to one another. I watched as they disappeared into the darkness of the night. I tried to compose myself. The teenagers had scared me none, but the streets of the old city had been haunting me in my dreams. What a terrible way (I thought later) to wake up from a nightmare to a nightmarish scenario. Memories unwilling to rest.

{The Stars}

It was soon after my encounter with the drunken teenagers that I moved away from the large statue of a king I did not know to an inner city park a few blocks away. The grass was soft there and never covered in dew. I would lie there at night, fighting away sleep (too scared to see the streets of the old city) and stare at the stars above. The nights were always cool and still and I felt a great peace take a hold of me when I stared up to into that dark blue sky.

I would smile at the stars. They were creation and pure. All knowing and beautiful. A reminder that everything was infinite.
{a day in autumn}
Suddenly autumn was around the corner. Rubbing her soft hands together. Muttering through the wind. The leaves of trees that filled the city parks and sidewalks slowly started to change colour and fall to the ground. All the colours. A feast for my eyes. I loved to watch the leaves fall. Slowly. Slowly.

{Beauty}

And I was walking the city streets one chilly autumn afternoon. And I was thinking it's time for a new home. Somewhere with walls. Where it's warm. It's getting cold. Real cold. I wake up with cracked lips. I've started to wake up feeling ill. The skies were dark silver and promised rain. I walked the city streets. Everywhere I looked I tried to find beauty in what I saw. In what I beheld. Something's were easier to find beauty in than others.
But look deeper, I said. Look deeper. Surely there must be beauty somewhere there. Beauty everywhere. Beauty in that fat man with sauce running down his half unshaven face. Yes. Beauty. Beauty. Beauty everywhere. Maybe I said to myself. Maybe. Still waiting to be convinced.

Walking the streets I had started to recognise some of the people of the city. People who came to this place day in and day out. People that worked here and could not wait to get out. I walked with a great smile on my face. No one else seemed to. No one. The more open I was to beauty the more she would let me see. It was a great day. It really was. Until I cut my finger on a piece of paper that a teenage boy was handing out.

{Blood and Glass}

Why did I take it? I asked myself much later on. I cannot read this language. This is not my country. This is not my home.
Why did I take it? I carried on walking staring at my wound, watching the blood slowly flow. The redness. It began to rain softly. While crossing a street the smallest of drops landed on my meager little wound. Diluting the blood and changing everything. How ones emotions can quickly change. How quickly everything can unravel. Maybe it was all in my head. It does not matter. The events still transpired. Everything became unreal and quite unfamiliar. It scared me how things began to appear, alien and breathing. Everything weeping. The plants with the saddest songs. I could not handle it. In an attempt to gather myself I rushed into a public toilet to wash my face. The floors of the toilet were filled with used toilet paper and old newspapers filled with the ghosts of the past. My body vibrated, so much so that I thought I would be sick. Somehow I made it to the bathroom sink, where in the reflection of the mirror I saw not myself but my father, watching me in disappointment. To him my life had always been a series of bad decisions. An elderly man walked into the toilets to find me screaming and smashing at the mirror. Shards of glass sticking deep into my hand. Blood everywhere. He stared at me deeply.Σ I stared back. I saw his fear. He saw my madness. He spoke. I did not know his words but they were slow and shaken and filled with fear. He slowly backed up the stairs, not taking his eyes off of me.

{Back to the Streets}

I found myself walking the streets again. My hands covered in glass and blood. I saw no beauty. None at all. I needed a new place to stay. I marched towards the park where I had been sleeping (also where my possessions where hidden in the bush) While walking I caught glimpses of people I remembered from many years past. I tried to avoid them. What were they doing here?
This was far too for them to come. My mind’s playing up I said. But I still found myself hiding behind doorways and down alleyways when I saw these people approach. Just in case. Just in case. The day had become too much. I had begun to question everything. To take a rest (it's hard when you cannot escape yourself) I sat on a bench. Across from where I sat a blind man played the blues on a steel guitar. A monkey wearing an usher uniform danced beside him with a mug of coins in his right hand. Between us three there was a constant flow of people. A never-ending flow. I watched the people file past and then quickly wrote in my ledger, staining the pages in near dried blood.
They file past, Like ants, Who is their Queen?
After this I continued to watch the pair play and dance. How much energy they had. Obscure thoughts entered my head. They would not leave. The dark clouds above my head rushed past and day got ever closer to night. The realisation kept coming back to me, that perhaps the old city had become the new and where to run now?

{Catching Kisses}

I found a cheap apartment (were the cockroaches included in the price?) and the stinging solace of cheap red wine. My money was running out, but I would still have enough for another couple of months. I did not eat well. Tomorrow I thought I'll start to cook for myself, but that tomorrow never came. My room was simple and warm. I had forgot the luxury of having a bed, though I tried to sleep as little as possible. The room was on tenth floor of a crowded apartment block, where people from all over the world lived. All of them with different skin colours, all with different native tongues. To me it felt like some zoo. I wanted to find someone that spoke my language; eager was I to talk, to make a connection with someone, anyone. I walked the hallways of the building knocking on each door, but no one that answered spoke the same tongue and I retired at the end of my escapade sullen and withdrawn, happy to know I had a bottle of wine. My room looked over a street where prostitutes sold their wares to all too eager men and I would watch the goings on of the streets all night. Can't sleep I thought. The streets. Those dreams. They eat away at me. So I would watch the prostitutes. One woman, I called her Petal, began to realise that I would watch every night. She started to pull the fingers and yell words I had no way of knowing at me. Soon however we became comfortable with one another, and would stare at each other with wide-open eyes and in those moments so much would be said. Hope and pain and fear of the future. As she would get into cars to travel to cheap motels she would blow me a kiss. I would catch them and swallow them whole. I loved their sweet taste and the warmth they gave me. She disappeared one evening in a black Mercedes though. Never to be seen again. Sometimes the world swallows us whole.

{A meeting}

Things became worse. I was in bad shape. I drank all day and ate from a pile of mushrooms that grew in the corner of my room. Their taste was bitter but one became accustomed to them. My room and the street below took new forms. I spoke to the moon. Felt it pulsate. Everything vibrated and melted into one large whole. I questioned my entire life and needed reassurance that everything was all right. But I was alone. I was on the brink of tears one evening, pondering death, when the door to my apartment sounded. I opened the door to a girl in her late teens. She was small and beautiful and entirely pure. She smiled sweetly and to me softly said.
You’re in bad shape. I nodded and let her in. She walked into the room and slowly looked around taking a seat on my bed. I walked to my chair by the window and sat down. Would you like a drink? I shakily asked. She shook her head. We sat in the silence of the room. She looked at the despair that was written over all the floor and walls of my room. I hear you scream all the time, she said. I meekly smiled. Everyone knows about you. They do? She nodded and then looked away. They do. You speak my language. There aren’t many of us here. I’m alone. We all are. Do we have to be? Some of us. What about you and me? I don’t know. Why did you come here? To see. What?

Who you were. Will you be back? Maybe. Come back. Please. I’ll see. Please. She stood up and walked slowly towards the chair I sat on, kissing me softly on the lips. I smiled for the first time in I don't know how long. She pulled away from me. Come back soon, I said. She smiled and slowly walked to the door. I watched how gently she shut it behind her, her every move so calculated. I sat there all night staring out onto the quiet street, eager to see her again, my heart on fire. I wanted to touch her again. For her to be mine. I smiled and thought of the future, of her and I and it all looked beautiful and free. I could not wait for her to come back. I did not need to know her name, just needed her.

{Waiting}

But she never came. She never came.

{Leaving}

I was alone and heartsick and my money was gone. The landlord would knock on my door yelling and screaming. I knew it was time to go. I packed my belongings and filled my bag with all the mushrooms it could hold. I had developed quite a taste for them. I walked out onto the dark street uncertain in where to go. I felt ill, but needed to move on. I was searching for something I was not sure existed. Onto the next city I thought. There's more to be seen. This world so grand and large. Filled with adventure and people to meet. It was all a lie really though. I knew it deep down. I was haunted by the past. Always taking the wrong steps. Every decision turning to shit. I had left the old city for the new city with high hopes, eager to escape the past. What had gone wrong? I did not know, but I still blamed that little drop of rain.

{Past Fading Away}

I started walking. The new city behind me. The lights of the buildings becoming smaller and smaller. Slowly fading away. I did not know where I was headed, but took much joy in my escape. Darkness surrounded me. I became one with it. Felt whole. The lights of the city I lost as I crossed over a hill. The future became now, became the past, lost and forgotten.