Hangovers

As I sat on the bus this morning
Hungover to fuck
I wondered how I'd write it down on paper.
The way I feel after a heavy night.
As we all know they are highly unpleasant
The screeching in your ears
Iron-brain
Bell ringing
Spinning liquid
Pulsing eyes
Like a tug of war
And the nausea
Murky depths of a stomach
Alcohol acid bubbling profusely like the mouth of a rabid animal
The craving and the hunger
The dry mouth to which refreshment is destined
but can never seem to come soon enough
To move is to puke
Is to go vertigo and fall down
Shattering your progress
Cold water feels like concentrated nirvana in your mouth
But icey hell on your skin.
Time is a slow healer
And soon we coax ourselves out of the state.
Able again to function above the level of neanderthal
(Just barely)
And then everything changes
Turns itself from ugly to beautiful
When you feel as lousy as possible, when you couldn't feel worse
Regular things become miraculous
Everything else is less lousy.
You can gain perspective and wisdom through hangovers moreso than being drunk (sometimes)
You can leave your house and see true beauty
That burning torch in your eyes
Blue sky, traffic passing you like neither you nor the drivers of the cars and vans and buses knew it but life was bringing you there right then for a reason and even if there wasn't a reason for it it can still be perfect in its insignificance like so many of us would like to be but can't.
We pass a guy leaning on a lamppost with his girl leaning on him.
They look into my sunglasses and I look back at them
And we share it
We are alive at the same time
And even when we're down
Real low down and sick and messy and rank
We are all of these things together
And that makes us solid
And we have the ability but not the means
So we'll be forever damned to our lives of nothingness.
You realise this and you can be happy
When you're hungover like I am
You can't help but laugh
When you feel that low
Hungover
By your own hand you confound yourself
You wan't to be hungover.
In the city
Eaing cheeseburgers for breakfast
Ice-cold coke
Look out at the buildings and imagine everything they're doing in there.
How their lives, their hangovers are ticking by.
You look up and you're alone
And your peace is right there
Alone with your burgers
Knowing you're always catching good breaks
But never realising it
That's what a hangover can do.
It switches everything on
Life lightens up around you
Until you recover
Or go to work
Then you just have to start it up again.
Start getting hungover once more.

Dead men you never heard of.

"Life was interesting for Claude Babin. Having lived through years of hell, his childhood, his teens, his twenties, he had finally found himself a groove in which he was comfortable. He'd somehow managed to scrape enough money together to open a restaurant, and open one he did, with flourishing profits. He was a food enthusiast. He could remember thousands of recipes. He never gained or lost weight. He knew who the best chefs were and who were going to be the best when they were gone. He was so deft he could tell simply by talking to someone about the most trivial of matters how skilled they were in a kitchen, sometimes able to guess who had what in their pantry. Despite this, he could not cook. No matter how precise he was with his ingredients, time, preparation, etcetera, every single meal his hands touched was recieved with a grimace, and often vomit. It was a curse that followed only him, for if he told anybody the ingredients to one of his masterpieces they could quite easily create it to his high standard of acceptance. He was not bothered who made his meals, as long as they were made how he designed them to be. Yet his enjoyment was always slightly sprinkled with disappointment in himself. With money, reputation and knowledge ever increasing Claude's later life was a perfectly pleasant one. Marred by his ugly inability to cook, he instead conducted. Only rather than a choir, a team of chefs. He'd stand infront of a horseshoe of action stations, one chef incharge of each ingredient, and bellow instructions out whilst gesturing madly with his arms and fingers. When the chefs heard their ingredients in a line, they would act accordingly. He got the meals made, and made good. He was a raging drunk, as he could not perform the function to which he was so passionate. Not being able to cook put him to the bottles and he very often worked under the influence. By day he would sit in bars alone, reading newspapers and drinking. People would pass him and ask "opening today?", for he only opened his restaurant when he felt like it (much to the irritation of customers who had tables which were booked from months prior, and his book-keeper who had to rearrange bookings for all the upset customers). But the later they asked, the drunker he was, so the answers he had given in the morning could be rendered lies by three o clock in the afternoon, some three bottles later. His method of supervision was as questionable as his drinking habit. He would never have a rota set up, for he didn't know when he would open the restaurant. When he decided he did want to open on any given day, he was simply telephone the chefs and see who wanted to work that night. They either did or they didn't, but they mostly did. He would call them up and within an hour the fiasco would begin; him insanely swinging around the kitchen, drunk and still drinking, howling out commands to his unit who worked with ninja precision. He somehow kept it all together and every order was met without fail. He was, in truth, the greatest there ever was in the kitchen. All he cared for was food. He was famous, but never greedy for the fame. It was just there, parallel to his occupation. He had money, women, exquisite food, fine drink, strong drugs and everything he wished for. Except of course, the ability to cook. His curse. Cursed men are led to act accordingly, and hence bring curses onto others. He was a dangerous man. Powerful, drunk and frustrated. He was forever changing his mind about everything, loving one minute and hating the next. People loved him and they hated him. He loved cooking but hated himself. Really hated himself. He lived only for one thing, a thing he knew he would never have. Try as he did to distract himself from it, it haunted his mind every second, and the longer it went on for the more insane he became. Drink worsened the torment and he was forced to live in a raging cycle of depression. The tale became a nightmare when one day a diner piped up about a blackened speckle on his potato. Babin lost it and came out of the kitchen with a skewer. He threatened to kebab the mans kidneys. When the police arrived he was three quarters through another litre and a half of port and had upgraded from skewers to steak-knives. One officer was fairly brave in trying to apprehend him which resulted in a chair being broken over his back. He offered the other officers a drink. They refused and arrested him. He was sentenced to 8 months in prison. On his first night in there they fed him a peach cobbler so offensive it caused him to shout "Holy fuck!" before clutching at his neck and vomiting. He vomited so hard he fell back and hit his head. He couldn't be woken and choked."