Autobiography

Well, just as I had passed my eleven plus at primary school, I passed my A-levels at secondary school sufficiently well to progress to University. At the time I was still something of a homebody, reflected in the fact that I applied to the five closest Universities and ended up at the closest  of all - which, in those days before the Government decided to rename half the educational establishments in the country as Universities, was The University of Birmingham.

In the first year I had a room on the eleventh floor of High Hall, in the back corner looking down at the bus stop and along the road. Unlike many I didn't find University an especially marvellous experience and I didn't make many friends. I haven't seen, heard from or spoken to a single person I was there with since the day I walked out of the place. That may be partly due to moving away to work in London but frankly if there had been a will there would have been a way. There just wasn't that much of a will.

Anyway, this is a poem called Eleventh Floor Solitary Blues. It's a new(ish) poem but I've tried to put myself into the frame of mind I was in while I was there to give an accurate flavour of the experience. It also reflects the fact that I had by then had the "wintertime" and the "party in another town" mentioned in a previous poem in this sequence but never managed, in three years to find anyone else.

Eleventh Floor Solitary Blues

There is music playing softly in another room
A wailing blues guitar
I'm staring through my window at a gibbous moon
And wishing on a star
I wonder where you are
I wonder who you are

I can hear the sound of laughter that's down in the street
Eleven floors below
I've got nowhere to go and I've got no one to meet
And I'm feeling rather low
I really ought to go
But there is nowhere to go

There is a poster of a pyramid hanging on the wall
From an album by Pink Floyd
I make a cup of coffee and I wonder why it all
Gets me so annoyed
That it all seems such a void
A bleak and endless void

And waiting on my desk's a lot of work I ought to do
But I just don't have the will
I take a walk out in the dark and I try to think it through
The lake looks black and chill
As I stroll on down the hill
Just once more down the hill

And in the student houses there are parties going strong
It's what I thought this time would be
But no matter what I thought it seems that I was wrong
I guess that's only me
It's everything I see
It's all the things I see

It's getting rather late and the night is turning cold
So I turn myself around
As I head back to my room I'm feeling much too old
And much too tightly wound
And on unstable ground
On ever-shifting ground

I lie down on my bed and keep on listening to the night
And wonder why I'm here
By the time I fall asleep again it's already getting light
And now that dreams are near
All my troubles disappear
See my worries disappear