He flew out the house, leaving his father's menacing roars having only the slamming door to reprimand. It was not the first time he had been forced to escape these drunken outbursts. Not the last time either, he thought sadly, lowering his head and jumping smoothly onto his skateboard, pushing the ground away and picking up speed down the bike path. Away from that house. Away from the neighborhood. Everything in it.
Could he help it if poetry had chosen him? No more than he could help his fathers distaste for it, surely. His love of words and of the esoteric relationships that existed between them had transfixed him from very early on, and it was true that his determination to consume the work of others had surpassed any other interest that had tried to impress upon him since.
He lifted his front foot, skidding the board to a halt halfway through Turnham Green. In front of him stood the brick wall that bolstered the overground rail; a place he often came to when he needed to be alone and think. That wasn't on the cards today. He pulled a greasy spraycan out of his backpack and walked purposefully up to the wall. The discerning simplicity of Frost, the bombast of Kerouac, the unfaltering support of a thousand long dead poets culminated in his mind as he slowly enabled the trigger of the can.
He stepped back, exhausted, admiring his work. For all it's profundity, he nevertheless accepted his inevitable role as an unappreciated artist. "One day," he told himself, "One day someone will blog about this, and only then shall my life have meaning."
3 comments:
Davey, methinks you're becoming a cynic in your new-found old age!
But even if reality is nothing like the picture you've painted, whether in facts or in beauty, I think you did manage to lift the, ah, "artist's" life up a trifle with this post, and, as witnesses to that, the lives of your readers as well.
A far, far better thing than I'VE ever done, at any rate. :)
Got me in the funnybone again! Good post, I'm still laughing. Just read your DJ post too - Cargo bar, huh? I hate that place (but that would probably be because I'm old, smug and have been wearing liberal amounts of condescension upon entry).
Don't sell yourself short May, you've done many, MANY great things in your time. Remember when you saved that Minke whale by taking out that Japanese pirate with a felicitous fly kick while shouting 'Haruken' at the top of your little lungs? Good times.
And Blakkat, I hear you on Cargo Bar, it is a hole like no other. I do not blame you one iota for giving it a wide berth. Please don't think any less of me for having played there. I was drugged, I swear.
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