Noel Negele

Sertraline

It’s bad and it will get worse—
this is the certainty.

Then
it will get better—
this the assumption,
the hope, the gamble.

On salary day
I spend the night 
drinking at a sports pub
in Newcastle.

I’m here for work.
It’s freezing up here
and working as a cladder
has never sucked harder.

I bet almost all my salary
2.350£ on Leicester to win
after they are already winning 
1-0 and with 1.95 odds
I’m looking at doubling
my money.

It ends with them losing
3-4 and getting back to my travel
lodge a homeless man asks me for money
and nodding him away from me
I think if I’d only won that bet
I’d probably take him by the hand 
to an ATM and really make his night.

Looking at people walk around life 
with seamless easiness 
has always been a source 
of great envy in me.

Always have felt that I’ve walked
in a quicksand the whole time
and the more I tried to keep up
the more I sunk.

The more they kept getting ahead.

Autopilot doesn’t work.
Stirring through every second 
of life manually is laborious work.

An unforgiving loneliness
monolithic in size and grandiose.

It’s like you’re that astronaut 
standing on the moon 
looking back at the earth 
getting hit by a meteor 
like an AK bullet going 
through someone’s chest

Nobody else but you left

And only for a short while longer.