An hour or so, but my mind keeps looking back to a past
as if trying to find the moment when things went wrong and
contentment escaped. It's easy to remember simple things
like when a winter my mother couldn't get the fire going
and threw my wooden fire truck, swearing at me for
crying; But that is not the problem, because I understood
when the room warmed and frosted roses on windows thawed.
Adults can hurt children more than they understand, when
in 1945 my father came home from the sea, I was sick in bed,
tuberculosis, my father pretended he didn't know this sickly
thing on the sofa and said who’s child is this? And ever since my
life has been blighted…. Yes I know, you will say, put the past
behind you; But my sense of inadequacy was so strong I found as
an adult that the only thing that made me feel equal was alcohol
So I became drunk, if a tame one, I never drink during the day
but in the evening when despair knocks on my mind I drink to still
the voice telling me I'm a fraud, a working class fool thinking he is
a poet. Alcoholism is not easy, it doesn't really exist as it is
an indicator of the unresolved. I write this and it is ten in the morn
but already I'm counting the hours when I can have a drink.
