Promise

In twenty hours I will have been around for twenty years,
Slowly I begin to ask myself: what have I accomplished so far?
The stereo’s playing a song that puts me back five years,
To a day I played a pc game with my sister and brother
I haven’t played ever since:

Comme le vent
Emporte les maux de coeur
Dans un ouragan
Tourbillon mille à l’heure
Je suis sans doute comme lui
C’est ok, je suis
Aux portes de ma vie *

Is it bad that I love a stupid song, a pop song?
Is this all there is? A memory linked to a French song,
A computer game? Have I nothing else to write about?
Parlo l’italiano, je parle français, ech ka lëtzebuergesch,
I master English, Latino studavi, ich spreche deutsch –
So what?
I write poems and short stories all day long,
That probably nobody except my friends will ever read.
So what?
I am an anarchist, a hopeless romanticist, a part time melancholist,
A lost pessimist, a fool in love and everything else that comes to my mind.
Like the wind…
Sitiing in my regular pub and feeling old, but comfortable,
Addressing the proprietor informally, regarding that cafe as a second home.
Still…
A quarter life crisis now that I realize the teenage is about to end,
And most of what comes to my mind are regrets. Regrets for things I always
Wanted to do, that I see the younger people do,
Things for which I missed the point to do them.
I was young and needed the money – about what exactly will I be able to say that?
I hate progress, now that I understand having taken thousands of pictures
Will not eternalize the events: they are just simulacra, silent images
Of what was and will never be again.
Now are the good old times as Peter Ustinov once put it:
Grommel will probably reproach me that I’m too melancholic,
And someone will ask me why this is a poem – is it? I don’t know.

Is this all there is, Flipsyde asks in their song. I guess it is.

But all I miss and keeps me from leaving melancholy behind is so hard to find back,
So difficult to hold, so impossible to understand and explain, so needed now
And always: Honor.

Sometime, maybe not in this life, I will find you, tell you and hold you in happiness
And sadness. Up till then, I will hold on to a red gown, a pink hair slide,
And remember that a forgotten backpack can have strange consequences,
While the Super Furry Animals sing that, at least, it’s not the end of the world.

— —
* Alizée: L’alizé (written and composed by Boutonnat and Farmer)