Mother tongue

I've lost the original of the above and now all that remains is a print and here’s a copy of that print. Along with this image others have disappeared too, some not copied, now gone forever. I have been - it's lamentable now, so very frivolous with my art in the past and not always intentionally because I've been just too drunk or dosed up to care or remember. I left a flat once with almost all my belongings including a beloved guitar and a painting by my mother because it didn’t matter, being as they were, secondary to my addictions at the time. She cries at the loss of my work and I reply to her that it's Karma for want of any other explanation, twisting the knife a little further into my side; remembering that so important object, that humble painting of a chicken entrusted to me, an organ from my Prima materia of mnemonic order, ripped out and mourned forever like an irritable scar.

In regularly administered states of euphoria, drawings and the like would be passed to shallow acquaintances and strangers; tokens of refracted and misguided affections. I suspect most were not appreciated and they are probably now dead, dormant or discarded, like some of the poor recipients.

Now that I'm older and mostly clean and sober I am so acutely aware of the time, so desperate to brim it all with what I've squandered that I have had to become more self-respectful of my delicacies. There is no point to being a waster, only that, ironically without my screaming, dust kicking, philanderous, deceitful, nihilistic madness I might never have fully accessed the dark wellspring of my art. Here then, a toast to mountainous peaks on the flat-line.

'Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness.' - Socrates