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Locuia intr-un apartament,
intre locurile mele preferate,
farul nemiscat si fluida gara.
Privirea mea trasa cai ferata
pe corpul ei,
nefiind obisnuit cu
asa multa frumusete necartografiata.
Erau multe de spus,
dar gandurile imi veneau salbatice,
in araba.

Intelegand caderea de limbaj,
ai zambit atunci,
asa cum oamenii zambesc cateodata
aplecati deasupra unui cappuccino cu bezea.
Am mai vorbit un timp,
si apoi bluza ta s-a deschis usor
in timp ce afara stele ca niste vecini curiosi
se adunau la geam sa ne priveasca.
Am plecat acasa in seara aia,
cu mainile ascunze de frig,
in buzunare goale.
Nu aveam nimic de oferit atunci.

The Last of Us

When I got back to my house in Birmingham, I felt like a ghost. While I was home I never really felt that I belonged there, but on coming back here, I felt invisible somehow. Like all memory of living in the U.K for the past year and a half had been completely erased and now I was breathing in the uneasiness of being a stranger in a strange land. Or as if I was gone for 20 years and I came back to a place that existed only in my memory.

I wandered around the house all morning from one place to another. Not knowing what to do with myself. I played some music. I tried to write.
There was only noise. All the pens were empty.
I couldn`t help but wonder if something had happened to me while I was gone. Suddenly I felt this violent urge to talk to someone. To tell them about me. The "me" that left and the me that came back. But there was no one. No cars in the street. No children making any sounds anywhere. Just an unusual silence and a white sun. I felt shrouded in a coma. I could`t feel anything.

So I just sat there at my computer. I stared blankly into the screen for minutes in a row. As time went by, I began to notice the music. It was All Gone. The Last of Us.

I felt my heart being squeezed into a fist.
I realized then and there that while I no longer had a place home, I came back to a place that is utterly indifferent to my existence.
That this city like any other on this planet nurtures its own. Has plans for any other human being within it, but not me. It felt for a second that everything I was going to find here will be a distraction. The nights will always be cold to me. The sky will frown above me and neon will jitter as I walk past it.
The canals, the billboards, the houses and the cars in the driveways. The trash and the strays. The junkies and the crazies. They will all drill a hole within my chest and move within me. And I will carry this miserable landscape with me for who knows how long.

I felt cheated. Defeated. In my absence, the world took from me, in small turning of minutes, everything I knew. The girl with crimson hair, was nowhere to be found.
I wanted to sleep.To crawl into the darkness and breathe there, like a wounded animal, under an orchestra of raindrops against my window. I couldn`t even cry. I just sat there, broken, in silence, in an otherwise perfectly normal world.
This could not be my life.

May the Hell you find yourself in be of your own choosing.

Time is the enemy. Who you give it to and what they do with it. And even when you keep it to yourself. It flows endlessly into the unknown. I often found myself measuring it in a desperate attempt to keep it. To dilate it somehow. I built bridges to the islands of people that were no longer there.
In filled glasses with seconds, minutes, entire lifetimes. And I left them, forgotten, on the roofs of buildings. On sidewalks, on bars with sticky floors in countries where others still play with it in memories.
For a while, I had this mad idea that hourglasses might be the way to freeze time. That if I didn`t turn them upside down, somehow, time will go past me, without even noticing my frantic heartbeat. You see, we live in so much fear.
Each morning our eyes desperately look for fragments of youth in our ever changing faces. We drink water to get younger. We drink liquor to forget we`re not in what we thought it was the prime of our lives.
With each mile on the highways of our lives, we feel the concrete closer. We wish on fallen stars for a cat-like existence. For 9 chances to live one good life.
There are nights, in our drunken Armaggeddon from which we wake, in complete estrangement from ourselves.
The orange glow of mornings catches us in every corner of the world sometimes wide awake, sometimes with bloodshot eyes. And we dream, in our psychotic karmic drive, of gardens. Of swings. But we wake up, everyday, breathing in the lethargic air of factories that threaten to consume the sky itself.
We run. Some go for the long distance. Some go in circles.
On asphalt. On clouds. On highways of smoke and glass. At some point, we were all works of art that nobody bothered to curate.
Now, slowly falling into the sleep of decay, we tremble in our dreams. Our souls soar above forests, lakes and innumerable hills. They fly towards beaches, guided by chemtrails.
Our souls...
I believe souls travel in pairs to destinations from our memory. Recently, mine sat on the roof the parking lot overseeing Venice. There it imagined the end of the world by flooding.
It sat in Cardiff with another one, at the door of a darken pub. Drinking.
But somehow it always finds its way to the sea regardless of where my body rests.
Life, for what it is, or what we imagine it to be, goes by patiently. It might leave behind a myrriad of photographs. It might leave anger and bitterness. Or nothing at all.
But one thing is certain: Death is waiting somewhere along this road. Be sure not to leave this world thinking that there was so much you could have done.

The Last of the Shadow Puppets Live in Bournemouth

As I sat on that chair, in that venue, I felt that I was being drowned in an ocean of impeccable sound. I sat suspended somewhere outside time, being pulled without even noticing into a vague and distant past. Fast forward images and crystal clear recordings of what I have said and what I have seen, now came and went by me like the trees you barely notice from a moving car. I saw a lost glove on heap of snow. A cigarette on the curve of a Lidl parking lot. A bottle of Guinness on a chaise-longue and a book beneath it.
I was on a sofa somewhere, in limbo, watching my own biopic.
Around me, silhouettes danced like vapour above the asphalt on a torrid summer day. Their souls seemed liquified, melting and then floating in the heat.
After a while, this reverie, like all others, ended in silence. The band stopped playing and reality slowly returned to my senses.

I spilled out into the streets carried by waves of people. Outside, in that cold July night, pumped up on confusion and cough medicine I roamed the streets for while. I bought myself an Asti and watched how all around me, drunken shadows were floating disoriented above the concrete. Looking for a fix. A sense of purpose. A quick display of affection. I wandered some more and the wind seemed to scratch my freshly shaved head. A subtle reminder of a temporary insanity.
The Bournemouth Pier stood inert, a spear towards the heart of the sea. I felt a ghost pain jab at my heart as I walked its wooden planks. For a second, I was home and the immeasurable loneliness stretched outwardly towards the unknown, instead of inward, as it always had. It was a good pain, like removing a bandage from a wound that is no longer there.
Eventually, I found my hotel and I sat on the terrace for a while. The books, the music, the places, the people. Everything I have ever held dear and stopped to remember, seemed to echo out there beyond the palm trees, beyond the boats, beyond the sea.
The ghosts of writers that once criss-crossed this world, invited me to sleep promising beautiful dreams. So I went into my room, closed my eyes, but slipped into a dreamless sleep.

When I woke up, seagulls flew nosily above the building and an anaemic sun shone timidly above the entire city. Somewhere in the distance,a plane slowly made its way towards warmer days. Maybe to Portugal, or Spain. I took by bags and decided to follow it...

Secret Pathology

It is a great honour to be an anomaly. To be raised by unprepared parents in concrete farms. To slide through life, cloaked in scales, with your back against the stars. YOur forked tongue, dripping, with sickly sweet words, intoxicating the planet with delirium. To pour your illusion into the world,
and for it to marvel at it and adore it, discarding all other real things.
Psychopathy begins in the egg, and patiently creeps within the cells, growing, with you, throughout time.
It is an orchestra in your mind, that lulls others to sleep. Or wakes them gently to the cruelty of this life.
We are the Venus fly traps of intelligent life forms. Within us lies the fascination of death, and our desperate inability to devour ourselves.