berlin

Do you remember the night we killed your parents? Their blood flowed down the road, we thought we could walk whichever way the wind blowed. On the streets we lived the dreams of the thousands and thousands of people sleeping. The steam from the roofs and rafters echoed the city’s screams. We were only seventeen and every dirty car that drove past was the sound of the Polizei and in every traffic light I could see your mother’s red-eyes. She thought you were too good to mix with the poor poor factory boy. At midnight we scaled The Wall, you were just five foot tall but you never did care for size. Berlin’s beauty and the beast, your cigarette whispered over the bricks towards the East. Your velvet touch against old carpenter’s tools, our four-poster heaven shook as the Grandfather clock beckoned its childish hands to 6. And when the moon died in the morning I stood in the doorway mourning looking back I saw a blank canvas laying unabashed above the covers as the sun streamed through the curtains painting the days light on your freckled back.

yellow roof

Growing up on a farm was never easy, and I suppose living on it now sure isn’t much easier. My Father, he used to breed racehorses out on the third field, the pretty girls came and rode them. I watched them out my bedroom window – even from a distance the sun used to bounce off their blonde hairs and hit my curious eyes and the wall behind me.

A while ago my Father found out I’d be stealing dope from the tin under his bed, bud by bud by bud went unnoticed until he saw the little finger marks in the dust. My Mother knew because I had the same red eyes my Father used to get. They both used to argue and I used to sit at my bedroom window.

But that was back when they used to talk, before he found out my Mother was screwing with one of his star jockeys. He went down to the stables one night and got fucked on ketamine, then he took the gun he used to put down the horses with and put down the jockey. That night? I sat on the yellow roof of our house and smoked my Father’s weed as I watched him get carried away by the Police. The moths danced around the bright cherry ash.

My Mother was never really the same after that. She never visited him in jail, t’was as if he was never here. At dinner once I asked her why she did it, all she said was: “Do you know we have twenty one stairs in that stair case of ours? I used to count them every time your Father threw me down them, and I counted them every time I came home in the dark from fucking around at 3 o’clock in the morning.”

And since that night…even 5 years on, I still prefer the view from the yellow roof rather than the bedroom window below.