In the cold tub, at ten-thirty in the morning, I float like a wreck
In the cold tub, at ten-thirty in the morning, I float like a wreck after a week of drinking and gambling,
My body trembles, my mind is a dense fog, when suddenly the phone rings like a bell in an empty church.
A young voice, a folk singer, tells me she has kicked out her boyfriend, his clothes flying out the window like lost birds,
I explain the cycle of love, a mad carousel of closeness and separation, a song endlessly repeating in the heart of time.
She asks if I want to hear her new song, and I, naked and wet, sit on the edge of the couch like on the edge of life's abyss,
My thoughts are as dirty as the bathwater, but I laugh at her funny lyrics, an old and tired clown's mask.
I tell her I like it, a white lie like the foam of the whiskey I later swallow, an antidote for my poisoned soul,
I promise to keep in touch, but the words are as empty as my pockets after a day at the racetrack, where luck deserted me again.
Six hours later, I am poorer by five hundred dollars, the money evaporated like my hopes for a better future,
I approach the phone, a tempting serpent of communication, but I leave it untouched, no one wants to hear a loser’s complaints.
The radio plays a sad song, the perfect mirror of my weary soul, defeated by my own inner demons,
The darkness of the bedroom swallows me, and I sink into it like a sea of regrets and madness, a castaway of my own life.
I lie in bed and stare into the void, lost in the labyrinth of my own mind, a Minotaur trapped in his own chaotic creation,
The thoughts spin like racehorses on an infinite racetrack, without a winner, without an end, just an eternal and futile race.
I am once again madly bound, caught between the walls of harsh reality and shattered dreams, a prisoner of my own choices,
A poet of despair, a singer of failure, a master of self-destruction in this crazy world that spins without me.
Copyright ©
Dan Enache
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