The Journal Of A Disappointed Man

I slip and slide through my life,
trying to get a grip on the rail.
I'm grasping in the dark for a switch
that'll turn on some almighty bright white light and thus, illuminate the way, the path, make everything clear as day. And every breath I take seems to be quickly rolled up behind me and filed away in memory.
Only a particular scent or dose of weather can pinprick the past and even then,
the drawer opens flirtatiously for just a moment.
I have lost touch with everyone I went to school with, everyone in the village where I spent most of my formulative years,
everyone I went to college with,
everyone I ever worked with.
They too, are filed away, often angrily slamming the drawer behind them,
over something I said or something I didn't say.
My lovers cannot be traced.
I know. I've tried.
I've taken trains to their cities and stood on street corners in the miraculous
off-chance that they might wander by.
But each time, I have returned home,
defeated and had to force myself to sleep
so that my heart didn't kill me.
I began my autobiography at 23 years old,
with the intention that I wouldn't live 'til 25.
But I'd done nothing, loved no-one,
said nothing of any great importance by that time.
The journal of a disappointed man.
I took a position at the Natural History Museum
but left after only 3 months due to allergies.
Whilst deluding myself that I could reinforce
the scientist's power of detached analysis
with a poetic intensity,
I would cough up my guts on the glass
that held the giant stuffed man-o-war.
I had a gift of incisive and candid comment,
but I failed to ignite it
when faced with the apple-cheeked Irish girl
who served the tea in the basement canteen.
Drunk most nights, in the Black Swan on Canal St,
I would attempt to put my own complicated nature
under the microscope of a beer glass.
I walked home alone, opening the air with bolshy,
slurred dictums against religion,
ethics, love and life itself.
Lonely, penniless, paralysed by the guilt
of never having told my father I loved him,
I wander hospital corridors, posing as a visitor.
I have wept, enjoyed, struggled and overcome
but I remain disappointed.