Bars Between the Left and Right Margins
"Bars Between the Left and Right Margins"
He was a mess. Messed up. Lost. He looked at himself in the small mirror fixed to the wall and then onto behind him, what he saw beyond his lost forest greens, his prison, was a torn page where useless words just bled invisible into the right margin that remained eternally empty of any mark or commentary. Like visiting day, no one came anymore, words just dissolved, like himself, invisible, non-existent into the barren floors and walls, blending in and meeting up with the echoes of all those who had inhabited this room before him and walked the corridors of this melancholic esteemed establishment with the miscreants and hollow souls who were now like phantoms to those they once knew and held close, who daily seemed to grow darker and immune to any genuine kindness or good deed, unless given with trade-offs. It was an empty, harsh and bitter existence to mentally survive, that is, what was left of one’s mental health. He no longer had a real voice, the urge to sing had been snuffed out long ago…and rightly so, he thought, what right do I have to sing at all, watching the music of and in others stolen or sucked out of their lives prematurely? Innocence was lost long long ago and taken. He had no piano, the guards held all his keys and whatever notes he read behind the bars, were now legal, medical and welfare oriented, short and blunt, authoritative, no free verse. He was a canary in a small cage within an avary of other khaki coloured birds, some sang, some didn’t. All were looking for the keys.
He was trapped between the bars of left and right margins, tightly reigned in, to remember eternally his screwed up sins. All he could think while he debated silently with his reflection in the mirror, was that he needed adroit editing in that moment, right there and then, to deliver to him the key that would open the door and then down the steps, to where he would make it through to outside and sing, with what was left in him, his break out song. Climbing up into the top bunk of his crib, he thumped his pillow and like a recalcitrant child always facing the corner for correction, he closed his eyes in the long suffocating hours and tried to reclaim his dreams.Of course, this was his second stint and dreams were hard to dream.
He was caught between the right and left margins, brackets and clauses, legally binding, morally binding, nine inch nails in a coffin of an existence that one self-taught, could not play the keys of a piano in ever again, except those he played by heart in his mind to never forget the story of how his life came to be this way, just be, a zero, a nought slowly swallowing his own tale (sic) tail. Ground Hog Day, mustered like rabid or mournful dogs in a pound, the electric bell rings, life is controlled, automated, hell to pay begins again, it never dies, the hours, days and years wasted and returned to the corner, the crib, to dream again of whys and what-ifs laced with sorrow and regret. A stultifying complacency had grabbed hold of him, he had no fight left.
The time would come when he was a free man again, but he knew the prison cell would walk with him until the day he died, it would always be like a monkey on his back, sharp clawed, digging in drawing blood, until he confronted himself in the mirror, speaking to what reflected in his eyes, asking for some kind of repentance, which he doubted, in any way, would now ever be delivered; just like all his letters that were written then placed on hold, he never mailed them, for he was certain the receiver/s had moved on to another address foreign and unknown to him….and what could he say, there was no way to lightly chortle on about anything of significance or in common with those who had now turned their backs. No, nothing to write to them about, he thought, when the something (he couldn’t think of it as a crime, more a sickness), was so terribly and consistently present. So he either crumpled up what he had written and threw it in the bin, which he knew others who were never meant to read his thoughts would definitely read them before incinerating them, or he metaphorically shelved the few words he had written next to the on borrowed time books brought in weekly on the trolley to his... “Not-His-Crib” and pondered whether he would continue writing and attempt a mail-off.
He tried not to think about the new unsavoury character he was now shacked up with in the small room snoring below him on the lower bunk and how on earth he was to find anything in common to live civilly, let alone discuss in great depth or at least animatedly with the fat flea. It was protective custody, of course they may have a crime in common, but if a chap wanted to keep their head above water here and their tale (sic) tail clean, their place and situation at chow time (politely referred to as The Gentleman’s Club) was never ever discussed. Knowledge is power, mate, it can be used against you, so no use whimpering about why and why you shouldn’t be here. This conversation to avoid, was a point drilled in by other longer-serving clock watchers. To survive, it’s always the best policy pal, never to discuss your crime or query others as to their past or current misdemeanours. Capiche?
The very few short letters he had considered sending, he now deliberated quietly, would remain unopened in a Dead Letter Queue somewhere. He no longer floated in the once confident self-delusion, that he would have visitors ever again, that anyone he once loved, who had invested their time and who had once loved and trusted him, would ever trust, believe or respect him ever again. There was no point mailing the letters. People had long since moved on and turned their backs.
What goes through the mind of a man once a boy, brains scrambled and then mercilessly fried by a kind-of-munchausen-by-proxy-matriach, who saw in her son the vision of what could have become of the father, her man, lost in that alcohol fuelled car crash of a road she was now forced to always walk alone, her crutch impeded by gnarled bones calcified with severe rheumatoid arthritis, fingers and feet; suspended through bad genetics, she was reduced to sitting still fixed to the same spot every day, which was beginning to make earning an income hard, or clawing her way up and down stairs, in pain with two children in tow. She floated through each day numbing the emotional and physical pain through alcohol fuelled daze, effed up and brutally lost. At some point she would lose track of her son, being physically impaired and with the self-medicating, totally unable to monitor him. Where did he spend his afternoon’s after school. She poured herself another spritzer and inhaled her Benson and Hedges Extra Mild. The packet was an elegant gold, “when only the best will do” motto, and she thought to herself, she was doing alright so far, that they were doing alright so far, but she wasn’t really and nor were “they”, her son and daughter. She wasn’t really concerned about her daughter, she seemed to be in a good place; her son was her pride and joy, little man, so much like his father, he was going to be something in this life and do something monumentally profound with his life, just like his father, she’d make sure of that and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and lit another nonchalantly.
When the boy was old enough to work, dropping out of secondary school early, Year 10, the mother went all-out for her son shortly after his departure from childhood into the real world. Her son (the boy-child man whom she believed wholeheartedly to be his father’s clone), would go and work in an Advertising Agency just like her husband, his father and through her contacts, secured him a job posting in a swanky advertising agency’s (bottom to mid tier, the truth be told) copy-write department. Within the first week, he was belittled by true writers much more experienced in the game of bullying, office politics and the lobbying of an egotistical ruthless advertising office, he was surrounded by the tetosterone of adult males, alpha, straight, bitch worthy and bitchy. He was edited brutally by the snobbish pseudo-intellectual-creative types, who saw him for what he was, uneducated, green and his mother’s son, a weak link, a job bought through a favour. Ah mother love. Sees all knows nothing. He came home utterly dejected, head down, self-doubting, hating himself. For a while he persisted in attending the same degradation, day in day out, to please his mother, to not fail her, certainly not to fail his long dead father and the small good memory that he had left of his father. In the end he threw the job in… and of course, he felt like a failure, consumed with shame and being Not-Good-Enough, which deep down soon became Never-Good-Enough. Ah mother love, destructive, manipulative, well-intentioned, yet lacking any empathy whatsoever. It all came from Love, it went out the door in a plume of self-hatred and hidden ill-feelings towards mothers and women in general. The daughter, who was “doing okay”, watched on feeling sorry for her brother and her mother. Her brother was a handful at the best of times, but she loved him, she was like her mother in that sense, her brother could do no wrong.
For a little while, he escaped, piano self-taught - playing Billy Joel like a pro in the back room upstairs, in his mother`s home. Later, when he had gained some sort of independence from his mother, securing a small flat above a shop (it was in an "A" listed heritage building, when only the best will do, he thought, inhaling on a stronger B&H than his mother smoked), he met a girl who was a complete mystery, she wrote songs, thought she was Kate Bush, poetry scrawled in neat handwriting that floated like ghosts on lace-paper doilies, Christmas captured in her suitcase, the airtag still attached, some bucolic town in the North hidden in the mountains – TRAVELLING TO - The Big Smoke. He raided her suitcase with a pal, who spoke like Richard Burton and looked like Ceylon Tea, one aimless quiet afternoon between shifts working in a telemarketing joint as a telephone canvasser. He was now in “Sales”. When she walked in and saw all her poems scattered over the lounge room floor, amidst overflowing trays of cigarette butts and heard her words being sung loud and clear by two very fine Penfolds Grandfather-fuelled voices, she felt quite proud, that maybe here was something she could do, “for real”, write songs. She was only 20. It never entered her mind that something sacred laying trapped in her suitcase had been disrespectfully raided.
The girl had long forgotten how to sing, or so he thought, for a few days while he played his black keys and ivory for her or twanged on his guitar romantically crooning Norwegian Wood, she loved the Beatles, he considered perhaps this was "LOVE". She stood at that piano, patiently turning the sheet music, which she could not read, he prompted her, while his foot pumped the pedal and he hit keys in G. She tried to sing in time with him. Her voice was okay, but it could be better. He thought, perhaps she had no power yet in her voice and one day when she had overcome her fears, her shyness, the voice would arrive like a blaring trumpet. She held such an air about her, naive, quiet yet eerily self-composed, pretending to always be free, but he could tell she was still caged. Intuitively he knew that feeling, so he saw it in her, but in another way and he sensed why and where the cage came from, but she hadn’t yet shared that information with him, she was secretive, guarded in her own way and held firmly to her chest that exclusive story. In that sense, part of her was a closed book. When she got upset, he got even angrier, her words stung like an army of Yellow Box bees and then within the hour, when both set of emotions had been hushed and laid to bed, she was a Bluebird singing Bukowski.
The favourite son. He was praised incessantly by his mother, what he needed was a father. He always heard his mother’s cheery accolades, yet he was never called to really achieve purely for himself, it was always measured against the weight of his now long dead father. He was only 8 when his father died and as each year passed, he tried to hold onto who he thought his father really was, there was love for a memory there no doubt, but there was always vacancy particularly at school events and social outings where other sons stood with their fathers. He either didn’t attend the events, or stood there alone, or worse with his mother, or a “friend” of his mother’s, feeling he lacked something the other boys had in those moments. Self esteem never was understood at a young age. But he always felt, there was something wrong with him, no matter how blustery people perceived him to be in his fake self-confidence. He could have won several Academy Awards. He had an uncle who was a British B Grade movie actor, his father’s brother. Worked alongside the likes of Roger Moore, The Saint. The family said he looked very much like his Uncle, more than his father. But his Uncle was in Britain, somewhere across a vast ocean far far away from the beach which was his front yard, his wide patch of freedom to escape his mother, who he no doubt loved, but despised in a way, at the same time.
The girl who wrote the songs, had lost her mother a few weeks after her 9th birthday. A connection had been made between the two young people, a common denominator, if you will with the death of a mother and father.
Somewhere between 8 and now, an introduction outside of what was deemed true and good arrived into his life. It defiled what was good and innocent and handed him the keys to another darker world. He closed his eyes and turned over in the top bunk and considered for a moment, it was all just a bad dream and that when he opened his eyes, he would find himself somewhere beautiful, a peaceful forest with a grand piano, space, fresh air, free, just to be, who he really was, a musician, piano self taught, no more bars, just keys.
(Lovejoy-Burton/October 2018)
"Romans" - https://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/romans_1052831
"Communion" - https://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/communion_1007994
1. The Piano Man/Billy Joel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_g7fPjVxvg
2. Honesty/Billy Joel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4gOIt-M02A
3. Got to Begin Again/Billy Joel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5VgzSGo2ks
4. My Life/Billy Joel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zA1OtsvvC4
5. Always a Woman to Me/Billy Joel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdxSmoxfl7A
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