A fumbling bee one day went buzzing. Stung a youngster as God desired it. The vinegar was fetched with bikes left behind in the shadow of Sunday trees. Sun was always on the weekend. We climbed trees while they played ball, never liked playing in goals. Always against an old blue shed they banged it, the rowdy lads who were quicker with quips. And my older brother, who never had patience for the flapping wee body that I had. He was my hero then, right up until big school. We climbed trees and built huts. And dug up old glass jars from God knows when. There were fields and there were hedges and there was endless exploration. We liked to talk a little deeper.

It seems to me that you can sell
Your soul and smile and tap the well
Whose sickly sap is hoarded keen
And feed the blood-run bean machine

The punters pace and stutter up
Hoping a drip will grace their cup
But it don’t come cheap, sweet buttercup
The time has come for growing up

Can you rake the yield of last year’s smiles
And fake your way up sickly aisles
Can you bear to grimace, fair and true
Whilst the child inside you cries ‘untrue!’

It’ll fetch a price, but not just yet
You’ve got to learn to market it
A burden further on your back
Grow up, take it easy, cut yourself some slack

You’ve grown up late, is the only thing
Words like Jaded take on meaning
And you see it’s only life is all
What of the gift? Shield it? At all costs?


I wanna write a little for the brethren. The sufferers. The sufferees. The suffragettes? Tis a weird one, to be clanged with the life-altering hospitalisation. Yeknow the one where you seen the inner-outer bits of reality, revelations, and the whole thing just changes. Then they fill ye full of medication that unadjustably alters your sleeping and living pattern. Gain a few stone, wake up every day depressed for two hours, need to eat but you’ve no motivation. You might end up in a hostel, you might end up alienating your entire family. You might end up in trouble with the law. I think a lot of people make it out you know. You might eek on out after some sensible lifestyle choices. You’re to all appearances a regular everyday ordinarily operating person. Then you get a family. You get a job, of sorts. People always ask, what are ye working at. Kind of hard to put it across, to some uncle, at a funeral. And they advise you to lie, ‘Yeah I’m CEO of a small but ambitious tech company up the road there. Aye. Yeah, DeckTech.’ But that kind of lying on the fly is hard too, especially to hardy old manly uncles who’ve a better winced-eye on the finer matters in life. Probably if you started into some mad conversation about shamans though they’d be freaked out, and they’d be the ones feelin’ uneasy.

But yeah aside from all the shit, the only thing that’s hard is passing yourself off as a normal person, or at least having the same expectations foisted upon you; only wanting, and probably attempting, to complain of your endless ailments at every given opportunity. It’s fuckin’ hard, and other people probably find you annoying as fuck. But what can you do. And then they shame you saying well yeknow we all have our troubles. I don’t know, probably true. And even when it comes to this, there’s a lot to be grateful for. But mainly I think, the danger lies in never really complaining.