Twenty Stories High
In an apartment building,
Twenty stories high,
A child was born to a Saturday night.
With a sunset view,
Over concrete skies.
This new born child was innocent for life,
A sunbeam held deep,
Within his mothers eyes.
So while his father continued,
To sip chilled Champagne,
Dom Perignon,
A vintage year indeed.
An infant was born with infinite health,
Blessed with a toast,
and praised by God himself.
Sunday morning awoke,
To calm the celebrations,
As the rain clouds broke,
To dampen a Nation.
His father replaced the Champagne,
With a pint treacle stout,
The yeast of their life's,
and a future placed in doubt.
His mothers’ choice of beverages,
Was Brandy, with a hint of lemonade,
Medicine designed to devour her,
Like an emotional roller coaster.
So why had these dreams deceive their eyes?
and unable to cope with the screams from this harmless child.
His Mothers life was something quite erratic,
While his Father spent his time, stuck in the traffic.
Monday morning arrived with the change of the tide,
As this dysfunctional family slowly began to subside,
and drown into the whirlpool of social rejection,
With alcohol there, to offer a fresh distraction.
To escape the existence of one so bright,
To free their minds from the pains of life,
But only for them, to crash back down to earth,
and far away, from this illusional Universe,
From where dreams are made,
and plagued with confusion,
Prisoners again,
To this cancerous institution.
So apart from disappointment,
His father forged upon him his name,
A spineless character, with intoxicated vein’s,
While his mothers habit remained,
Distinctively the same,
Dependent on the brown, with a society to blame.
The child wept, while his Father cursed,
and his Mother lied, with a future in reversed.
On his fifteenth birthday,
and with those childhood memories, left engraved,
He softly whispers a Kipling verse,
and yearned to adopt a fresh Universe,
A place of love, a trace of a dream,
and far away from pollution, and social victims,
So maybe now was the time, for him to fly,
Away from this view of concrete skies,
‘But this is my life’ he said with a sigh,
‘This is my tower block’
Twenty
Stories
High.
Tony Burch
Candolim, India 2006.