There is a man, he is punch-drunk and reeling to riot. He holds on to silly, fickle and unfounded views of the world as he harks back to a time and mourns its loss. 

To him, hope is not progress but regress; to that place and to how it felt. He doesn't think; about why things have changed, or why they must. 

What is to be done with him? Where should he go? 

He wonders the same as he wanders his town, whose streets seem smaller and sadder than they once did. When he believed that he might grow so great its fabric would surrender at the weight of his expansion. But its firm concrete walls only grew old and stale and still. 

 

Another new sun rises to kill the same old, cold moon. The one he often watches at the end of another sick night. 

The sun he hasn’t felt in years, its rays, that once left lingering in him a still calm, have become no more than mere fact. 

Facts; the kind he hates so much. The kind that remind him of how much he’s lost, time, since he and his were country and king. 

Reds and blues and whites and Whites, the kind he loves so much, the hateful type.

 

I could almost hear his voice through the gaze I travelled on. 

Of his father’s words and the meals his mother made him. 

Meats and cheeses with bread and pickles. Pubs and geezers and a football screen; beer or drink or pints or lager. 

Too busy chasing birds to smell the roses or punching faces to feel the pain. 

The growing kind. 

He spoke nothing of himself and said only that everyone ages but nobody changes. 

He told me I should go back to where I came from and stay there just like he did. 

 

His hollow town reeks like History; a place of ghosts and empty spaces; roads to nowhere. 

Music. 

Experience profound and emotion unseen, hidden from his world of cow boys and princesses, that died with the seed hope had sewn in him. A hope that only hurts him now, as it hurls against his flesh, that like cages contains all that he is; regret.