Je voudrais un Kriek

Three days ago I was rummaging through an old draw full of birthday cards and discarded letters; I came across a cheap notepad I’d carried around last summer. Half the pages were ripped out but little bits of paper had remained in the wire-binder at the top, like flesh caught in the teeth of a cannibal. I flipped it open, in search of a spare page and was stopped in my tracks by a poem I’d forgotten I’d ever written.

It was written during a trip to Belgium last summer. I’d gone to visit a wonderful friend with a group of boys I’d lived with for the year. The week was fuelled by absinthe, set in gay bars and spent requesting gaga songs and smoking shisha pipes. The police were sent round so many times, they made it to the top floor bedroom. The sun held our hands as we sipped strawberry beer and the evening propped us up as we ballroom danced through the crowds. It was debauchery at its cleanest, it was safe yet it seemed magnificent. At the time, I wished to be a speck of dust on a broken record, mindlessly spinning on repeat, the song never intending to end. I’ve seen the hand-writing on that page before, usually the morning after the night before; I remember leaning out of bed in lamp-light, my sight smudged from the liquor, as I scrawled the way I thought that the record really would never end...

When the crystal in my hands melts through my fingers

The scent of my perfume no longer lingers
My smooth, youthful skin sags, droops and wrinkles
My poems are unreadable, the pages stained and crinkled
The bank assistant too often shakes her head and sighs
And we suddenly realise that stars are only fireflies,
I’ll know as long as these times are never forgotten
As long as my memory never becomes sad and rotten,
The effervescence of smiles cracked open like dawn
Will never diminish, never fade and never look too worn.

On first reading this poem, I laughed. ‘It’s crap’ I said to my friend who sat with me, ‘I’d been riddled with booze and sentiment - the most lethal cocktail for a poet’. I wrapped cynicism around me like a winter coat. Convinced the concept was naive, the notion ridiculed because those people don’t know me anymore - after a year of moving on so fast we could barely tell we were in motion. Yet here I am, hair shades different and age caught in my skin; my lips curling up as promised, as though reaching for the memories atop my head as I reminisce.







We’re wavering on change, but my sentiments are still resounding.