Graduation.

I didn't go to my graduation.
I didn't return to Newcastle upon Tyne for fourteen years.
It didn't get me into its bloodstream.
Final year of uni was fucking awful!
On every distropic level.
Work, levels of debt, shitty flatmates.
Answering to the wrong texts on the wrong exam ... Only leaving me with novels I didn't like!

Dad, apart from the one Easter break on the Strand in Western Australia House, was unrelenting in his personal destruction of me as his son and the inevitable depersonalised individual he made me. Oh those ten years of spite. Oh his forgetfulness. Oh his tyranny.

And oh, I got drunk in the Cooperage while trying, one last time, to copulate once, at least, with one of girls, who were always exclusive and elusive, who I'd come to know (hardly) in those tortured three years!

It was always pissing it down. And windy. And dark.

Here I sit feeling little towards
Them
Yet have I some affinity towards
The smoke stacks.
The chimneys;
No longer swept by my lot!
Standing regimented and unused.
At the end of their moment. The finality of what I can be. Now an antique, a remnant, a memory; smoke free;
Empty.