In my lonely room
I conquer the world
In my dreams that failed
And paled to the loss of a girl
Here I shed my tears
Over bitter wasted years
That led me to this crowded place
Filled with memories and fears
I never dreamed my life would lead
To this lonely room
Since you cut me I bleed
In this lonely room
(C) Frank Howson. 2019
We live in a world where voicing the truth can have you socially banished.
Where children from the time they can walk are taught to not trust grownups. Then we grow up to not trust anybody.
Where Satanists teach the word of God.
Where marriage is for a few years at best and then you have the house to yourself.
Where an allegation can end your career.
Where originality will get you remembered after you die of hunger.
Where friendship is seen as an “investment”.
Where it’s okay to lie about everything and invent your own realty. This was once called “delusional” but now it’s called “faking it till you make it”. Make what?
Where giants are brought down by dwarves.
Where the mainstream media no longer has any credibility.
Where music is disposable and no one cares who wrote it, produced it or played on it.
Where the majority of movies are based on comic books.
Where integrity is seen as old fashioned.
Where you can steal someone else’s idea and not only call it good business but be able to look at yourself in the mirror without flinching.
Where to win at any cost is admirable.
Where a text message may offend unless you post LOL after it.
Where we know everything about ourselves and zip about others.
Where justice is not blind it is biased.
Where if your political candidate loses you must hate, riot, rally and unsettle things so that the winner can’t do their job. In the old days this was called being a sore loser after the majority of the people (which is democracy) have spoken.
Where our heroes are edited out of history because they were flawed in some way that doesn’t sit comfy with our current PC beliefs. Even Jesus lost his temper and took to moneylenders with a whip. Proving nothing other than he was human.
Where wars are invented for profits or to take the heat and attention off homeland scandals.
Where the past is never learned from because it is not respected.
Where people gleefully buy the lies that will bring about their own demise.
Politicians reach out to the poor in their election campaigns but cynically know they won’t resolve their situation as to do so would lose them their voter base. Keep the needy needing.
Where TV reality shows teach the young that if you lie, deceive, backstab, and play everyone against each other, you will win.
Where people fear the existence of a God because they fear being judged.
Where sex is mistaken for intimacy.
(C) Frank Howson. 2019
It started out like a normal day for the man of the house. He had breakfast with his wife. She was no warmer or cooler towards him than she had been for a long time. He read the morning paper, donned coat, picked up his briefcase and left for the office.
She reminded him that there was no office anymore. He had to acknowledge that all that is now part of “the past”. Putting aside momentary chagrin at the loss of anticipated freedom he feels safe. There will be no more journeys into the outside world.
He and his wife relapse into a conversational sortie we know they have ventured into often before, their discourse, though completely Australian, throws up the cliches and truisms of everybody wisdom and in almost Pinteresque way introduces echoes of Oscar Wilde’s sublime parable “The Happy Prince”.
A telephone rings but nobody answers. It has no dial – like the clock face in Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries.”
There is an unexpected knock at the door and a man with failure written all over him seeks admission. He has about him the air of a failed vaudevillian/cabaret performer. Like T. S. Eliot’s narrator he has seen the moment of his greatness flicker…but…”I am not Prince Hamlet…”
The dialogue is cryptic, enigmatic, redolent with oblique references to poems, books and cultural assumptions, skirting banality while continuing the Pinteresque reference to the daily metaphors which have been the cliches while still retaining their nugget of “the truth” and providing many moments of genuine “comedie noir”.
Another visitor bursts in, this time no stranger. Stinky Radford is an actor, lover, a forceful extrovert character, beloved by both Man and Wife. Asked about his life, he bravely lies while we see that he too is not Prince Hamlet, nor was he meant to be.
While the husband muses upon the remembrance of the past, Stinky makes love to his wife, who was once his wife too. Then, girding up his loins, he leaves to…try again?…to solve the riddle?…face the music?
By the time the audience have accepted the essentially metaphoric nature of this work of cinema: the room is none other than the stage on which Sophocles presented his vast and mighty tragedies, or Aristophanes his satires: the same stage which Shakespeare saw as emblematic of the world, “on which stars in secret influence comment”.
Another visitor – a youth, streetfighter, violent, working-class poet and thug – shades of Jean Cocteau here – bursts in and now we are given our first inkling of the exact nature of the metaphor we have been watching. Despite his bravado and overt displays of machismo, he is terrified by the wife’s advances. We are justified at this point feeling that perhaps all of the male characters are aspects of the husband’s psyche and that we are witnessing a revelation of Everyman/Everywoman in a decidedly contemporary encapsulation.
A plain-clothed detective arrives. Perhaps he is in pursuit of the streetkid but doesn’t reveal his quest, as he attempts to interview each of the people present. But the more he strives to get to the bottom of things, the lower the foundation of his beliefs and view of the world descend.
The wife reminisces volubly about a lover, a lawyer with an earring in one ear.
Stinky Radford returns, having failed to discover anything. The streetkid wants to go back but Stinky assured him “there’s nothing out there”.
The husband has already asserted “we are kindred spirits,” and “this is the room of the lost”.
Finally, Music and Light and mysterious opening of a door heralds the moment when Man and Wife must Face the Music in an upper room (the Upper Room?). He is the Happy Prince, denuded now of all his finery, and she, the Swallow who will not leave him. They are translated into Light.
Immediately they are gone, another figure bursts through the front door, demanding explication. He is obviously the Lawyer who has been the wife’s lover, and in the manner of lawyers he threatens to sue everyone until “you’ll wish you were dead!”.
As his four auditors laugh and laugh we now know exactly where we are and the form of the film, which has been hovering at the corner of our consciousness now snaps into place – and everything makes sense.
“The Final Stage” is, at its deepest level a work of art covering in an original and ground-breaking way the same philosophic and metaphorical terrain covered by Jean Paul Sartre in “No Exit”. It is also a funny, sad, poignant, piquant, witty and disturbing story which amuses us while it reminds us of the – dare we say? – eternal verities of Life and Death.
Because of the way “the story” unfolds – similarly to the creative method employed by Peter Carey in his best short stories – the film is decidedly out of the ordinary – its unusualness and the charm and variety of the performances, induce us willingly to suspend our disbelief. Those viewers familiar with poetry, the theatre, and great literature will find echoes of those other forms and discovery of such connections gives the film’s delightful tension. Theatre-goers, one hopes, will appreciate more fully the slightly theatrical edge to the dialogue. But everyone should be able to see that “The Final Stage” makes a significant, even historical contribution to our understanding of film form in the deepest sense.
– Adrian Rawlins
Critic &. Poet
1994
Review written for Farrago.
Produced, Written & Directed by Frank Howson starring Adrian Wright, Abigail, Tommy Dysart, Michael Lake, Zachary McKay & Tiriel Mora.
photograph by Luzio Grossi.
I sit in this room, this crumbling room I grew to love, cluttered by the mementoes of a crumbled life. Framed photographs of friends, lovers and family, all long gone. My bookshelves filled with the greatest wisdom the world can offer, written in the most eloquent of ways, and yet all it did was lead me here. And very soon lead me somewhere else because of a landlady who is in my opinion certifiably insane and subleased apartments to me and several others without having the authority to do so. I would’ve thought that was fraud but it seems the police have no interest in fraud these days. I guess there’s too much of it to deal with.
So good luck out there trying to deal with people in good faith. I have written in the past about the death of common sense. But I also believe we have lived to see the death of basic common ethics. All of this of course is flamed by apathy. Nobody cares anymore. We are too emotionally burnt out by watching the end of the world live on the internet.
Einstein could see things the rest of us couldn’t. And yet quite often was unaware he had odd socks on. John Lennon was so acutely insightful and sensitive about himself and yet could not pick a mad man who meant him harm. We can, allegedly, put men on the moon and yet so much of ourselves is left untouched. How deep does that darkness go? That inner space we fear to go lest there be no coming back?
They say to kill someone also kills a part of ourselves. So, after a few more what is it to kill six million? It just becomes a number. We live in a society that does much to take away our dignity, dehumanise us, mock our integrity, and reduce the truth of our lives to third hand gossip because we have lost the will, the pride and the energy to correct it. No wonder we have become the most dangerous species of all. In fact, if we went away the world would thrive. What a sad epitaph to our existence. The proof that there is intelligent life elsewhere is their very reluctance to make contact with us.
Is it easier for us to hate than to love? Yes. But we weren’t born like that. The act that creates us, most times, is love and we are programmed to be born into it. But if that love is not waiting there, and all we get from a mother is regret and tears, and from a father anger and blame, how could we ever wish for the capacity to hope, or know of its existence? Monkey do as monkey see.
Some of us are born into great love and a warm bed. We are shielded by our parents in our formative years so that we don’t experience too much hurt, rejection, violence, and any physically harmful mishaps. They sing us lullabies and read us stories about heroes who laid down their lives for something bigger than themselves and are loved for it. We are nurtured like this until we are old enough and adequately delusional to go forth into this world in search of a love of our own. For we’re told we are not one until we are two. Complete. Our better half. Ready to be wedded to each other and to a mortgage, a job that pays us enough money to sacrifice our self-esteem, 500 pay channels of crap and fake news to dumb us down, and a long slow road to that retirement village and watery vegetable soup until one day we surrender back into that inner space. And if we have lived that accepted life without complaining we are deemed to be the lucky ones in society’s eyes.
But what happens if you are full of love for everyone and yet never find the right partner? Or waste your best years on the wrong ones? Well buddy, you’re on the scrap heap of life. Banished to Regret on the outskirts of Shame. Always finding yourself standing in the rain on somebody else’s property, constantly being moved on. Looked at suspiciously. Labelled a possible future threat. Told that we just don’t “fit in.” A gypsy. A fugitive. An unwanted man. As doomed as Jeffrey Dahmer.
I once wrote the following lines for a Keith Potger song, “The cowboys pine for the open range, the sailors stand looking out to sea, the gangsters get gun-shy and start acting strange, and the lovers end up like me.”
So, if the very foundations of our existence are either gone or, at the very least, shaky and unpredictable, is it any wonder we make such poor decisions in regard to everything else? And to the many of us who have lost all hope and are locked away in our rented tombs, are we not ticking bombs? The most dangerous person in this world is the man who has nothing left to lose. In effect, he is already dead. He no longer fears the police, or jail (he’s been living in his own for far too long), pain, slander, or meeting God. The government hate this person because they are considered a wild card and their actions cannot be predicted. You cannot bargain with him or her for there no longer exists anything they want. All those desires and needs and beliefs died long ago. The seeds were planted when we got too close to Santa Claus and realised he was just an out of work actor in a padded suit designed by Coca-Cola, hiding behind an ill-fitting false beard. In most cases this disillusionment make the disenchanted confrontational. They demand answers. If we have been expertly lied to about Santa for years where do the lies stop?
Man kills anything he can’t understand. And one of those things is love. We have a long history of murdering the messengers who preach it as our salvation. But if you promote hate and genocide and are paid big bucks to invent sophisticated lies a government can sell, you’ll most likely have a long life and die in your bed.
Recently a man who’d died for some time during an operation and brought back to life, was interviewed about this experience. During his dead time he said he’d had the usual white light sighting but then travelled on into the heart of it. He then became suddenly aware of a powerful presence behind him. He could sense it. When he went to turn, a voice of great authority said to him, “Don’t turn. For if you see my face you cannot return. And trust me you wouldn’t want to see me angry.” (The last statement proving God has a sense of humour.) The man asked, “Are you…?” To which the voice replied, “What do you think?” The nervous visitor then said, “May I ask you a question?” And the reply was “Yes. Of course.” The great presence was then asked, “What is the meaning of life?” There was laughter and then the response, “I get asked that a lot. It is very simple what life is about. Love. Love one another and be loved in return. This is not your time. You need to go back and appreciate the love you have. But when you return we will have much time to talk and you can ask all the questions you wish.”
The man was then hugged by the presence and the feeling of unconditional love filled him with a joy so intense he feared he was going to explode. And then he was back in this life. He weeps to this day because he misses that feeling of unconditional love. It seems that a love that pure without agenda could be addictive if we ever experience it.
Perhaps Life really was meant to be that simple. And man through his over-inflated ego has sought to make his own impression by complicating the natural balance and looting everything he can for his own benefit. In this lust to sell the world, pure true love has been replaced by how many women you can con into your bed for bragging rights to impress other con artists. But there is no love in carnal conquest just as there are no riches in financial wealth. Those who have acquired huge fortunes by walking over people often, at the end of their days, talk about the hollowness they feel inside. Having killed many lives with their fountain pens, and the excuse, “We’re just doing our job” they then attempt to fill their dead centre with booze, drugs, and sexual perversion. But that leads to feeling even less. “Pity the man who inherits the world but loses his soul”. You can lie to your conscious but not to your subconscious, for it records every con, lie, hurt, betrayal, etc,, until one day you cannot take any more, and so you don’t. The suicide rate is astonishing amongst the extremely wealthy. This doesn’t get much press because the power brokers of this world who push for more and more productivity are scared to inform us that our goals are wrong and that money is a false god.
I fear it’s too late for us to reprogram ourselves. This bullshit is too ingrained in our DNA. Or is it?
There’s a very insightful lyric by that mystical troubadour Bob Dylan, “Man has invented his doom, first step was touching the moon.” We have now invented technology that gives us the internet which we were told would open our minds, make our lives easier, and that the answers to every question would be at our fingertips. So how come the ignorance level has never been higher? We also don’t need to have to go to all that trouble inviting someone over to participate in sex because we have every porn clip in the world depicting every sexual fantasy anyone could possibly imagine, all performed by beautiful people. It saves being rejected, as well as all that energy. But should we be inspired by the sexual acrobatics upon our screen, we can get into Tinder and have a total stranger knock on our door within the hour. As easy as ordering a pizza. Too busy to establish personal friendships? Not a problem, grown men can play online games. It’s very exciting.
So, we become more and more isolated within ourselves, and reality is conveniently invented and programmed for our personal needs as easily as switching on the air conditioning to our perfect temperature. If there is a Satan could he have invented a more effective device to bring about our own hell?
But that’s where we are now. Perhaps the world has ended and nobody told us? Where are those madmen in the wilderness when you need them? Oh yes, that’s right, we probably killed them. Or at the very least, locked them up. Discredited them with a phoney scandal. Silenced them. This modern world doesn’t tolerate freedom of speech anymore. Yet it was those opposing voices and radical opinions that triggered spirited debate that led to positive changes. Today all the truth tellers have been very effectively silenced for fear of being labelled a Nazi, a sexist, a fascist, a racist, a bully, or just plain crazy. And in the present day world, if enough people unfriend us do we really exist anymore?
How clever of a higher being who initially gave us free will, to also have allowed us to orchestrate our own doom.
In spite of it all I still believe in love. And in the inherent good in the majority of people. We have just lost our way, that’s all. And the road back is very difficult to find in the dark.
(C) Frank Howson 2019
He aged within the silences of our stilted conversation. His eyes were those of a man who’d seen his kingdoms fall and the survival mechanisms of such pain had turned him into a statue. Although he was outwardly pleasant and patient there was no one there. He was a ghost haunted by himself but chained to a place that had been familiar in his real life. I wondered if like other theories of ghostlore he was doomed to act out his past mistakes over and over again until they revealed something he hadn’t known before. And replayed to the incessant drumbeat of “If only I’d done this. If only I’d done that. If only…If only…
The dark circles beneath his eyes told me he didn’t sleep much and that the night was rarely his friend. To him there was no morning, afternoon or evening only awake time and dozing time.
It was those eyes that still haunt me to this day. They told me they knew the secrets of this life and that the knowing of such things begats a penalty far beyond any pain most humans experience.
He said his best writing came to him at 3am which was God’s favourite time to speak through us, when the night is still and the silence is that of eternity. The world at momentary peace with itself and you feel you can hear God’s breath within the comforting embrace of darkness. Such were the fleetingly magic moments when inspiration struck him.
He felt he was no longer a person, but a vessel. He had worn himself out in his search for a lasting kind of love and knew now that it was not written as part of his destiny. Hence he no longer sought it for it only carried disappointment in its train. and such disappointment sometimes took years to wash away. A penalty for those who cared too deeply. Furthermore he now feared he no longer contained the capacity to feel the emotions of normal people, and wondered why God had spared him and taken so many others. Sometimes it crossed his mind that the lucky ones died young, still hopeful with dreams intact. He mused that perhaps that old saying was true, “God calls home first those he loves the most.”
These days he liked to walk in the rain. It made him feel something.
(C) Frank Howson 2019
Photo by Raija Reissenberger.
The trumpets that break the dawn
A fanfare to the dying and unborn
Passion replaced by duty
Love replaced by fear
And the ticking of the clock
Says “Young man please take stock
Before you finally disappear
I fought a war for you
I fought a war for you”
The battle across the hall
Still rages as our fathers stumble and fall
Isn’t anyone happy?
Anybody care?
It’s not the cutting of the vein that causes the pain
We’re killed long before that final dare
I fought a war for you
I fought a war for you
All the wasted years
Lost in action
All the hollow dreams
All the bitter tears
To make you happy
To have a faithful love
Forever young
Always in the sun
All the things I wanted
All the things never done
Like our dreams we too are fading
Before we have barely begun
I fought a war for you
I fought a war for you
I fought a war for you
Isn’t anyone happy?
Anybody care?
I fought a war for you
Put your hand on my heart
Can you feel it?
Can you heal it?
Am I still with you?
Are you still with me?
Let’s open the paper and see
(C) Frank Howson 2019
In my time of dying
They’ll call for a holiday at the workhouse
For there’ll be no bills to be paid
Mouths to be fed
Or favours to be returned
And the women that loved me may walk a little slower
And the men who plotted my downfall will have nothing to do
The people who go around taking names will give them back
Realising their data and all their lists reveal not a thing about who we are in those lonely nights
In our lonely rooms
Where the hours after midnight are our only friends
And some will weep for what was denied
And others will laugh at the remembrance of what was done
There will be those who will continue to phone my number expecting me to be there
As I did for some weeks after my poor mother died
Others will walk with my ghost
Along familiar broken dark alleys
That I walked to expend my joy and tragedies when they were too intense to share with anyone
Some will cry at the ground beneath my headstone thinking I’m there
But I’ll be gone from the things that rooted me to this earth
Maybe some women will regret that we didn’t take that dance
Just once perhaps
In an intoxicating act of madness
Risking the stars for a shot at the moon
But we risked nothing
And got nothing in return
Staying home
While others saw Paris
Saving ourselves for what?
We weren’t given a life for safety
But rather to live
To make mistakes
To learn
To rage
To feel
To love
To sometimes get it right
And to find shared humanity
In the loss and ruins of our deluded dreams
Some will express disappointment
That they never saw what I did
Because there were too many excuses that kept them home in front of their mirrors
Reflecting on things long gone
Old men with cracked voices revealing broken hearts will drink to our friendship in all the bars where we laughed away the night
And reduced all our tragedies to punchlines of a joke
Those whom I loved will know that I loved them by the strange feeling of warmth they feel each time they remember me
And that will be because I am still with them
Smiling that smile when you have said it all
Shared it all
And given all
And they will be the custodians of my true legacy
Not the academics
Who never knew me
Nor the critics
Who never got me
Nor the talkative acquaintances
Who never saw me bleed
And be less than myself at times
Or surpass myself when a friend had stumbled
And needed someone to defend him or her
No, don’t look for me in the cold corridors of libraries
Or reduced to a 60 second grab on a news channel
Or killed again in some passionless speech from some senile professor
Who thinks he has worked me out
Or edited to the bone in an obituary dashed off by some hack demoted from the sports page
For I was never here for them
I was here for you
You were my mission
My purpose
I have seen how people are rewritten in order to take their place in the posterity of people’s hearts and minds
Sanitised
Buffed up
All the creases ironed out
Photoshopped
Christ-like into history
By a St. Paul who thinks there may be a buck to be made from my resurrection as a different man
My intentions adapted and rewritten to reflect someone more palatable to the masses
As if it is not enough to be crucified in life
They must crucify you in death too
Eventually we are all turned into Lincoln monuments
Stony cold and all-knowing
Devoid of all the doubts, regrets, mistakes, failures, anger, frailties and foolishness that made us human
For the road to earthly perfection and hero status is merely a Houdini illusion
The big lie
Told enough times to become fact
But if this circus comes to town
I don’t want you to attend it
For you knew me better than anyone
You saw me weep
When I pretended not to care what they said about me
You saw my anger
When I turned the other cheek
You saw my bewilderment when success came too late for me to care
You saw my scars from the loss of the irreparable
You saw my kindness without agenda and trusted it
You saw the pain that wrecked a life but was rewarded with a shining talent and an impossible schedule
You saw an old soldier’s dignity that could not be captured by the enemy
You saw the effort it took to face another day
You heard my prayers and the foolish hopes and dreams of a prize fighter punch drunk but still standing
You heard my approaching footsteps when all the others had run for cover
For you were my friend
And I loved you with all the nobility of Sir Galahad laying down his life when it was needed
Drinking
And discussing life
And the reasons we live it
Till dawn
At our little round table
Watching you being whipped for the sins of others
I caught your fall
And guided you to the ground
Safely
Laughing at the stupidity of taking it all too seriously
For it, after all, was just a dream
And now here I am
In another dream
And can be summoned up whenever you need me
I am stronger now
Rested
Weightless
Joyful
No aches
And the night, and people, can no longer tire me or disappoint
I am now all yours
And no one can be jealous of what we have
Your past and present friend
Who came to save you from the confusions of life
And in doing so saved myself too
It is only love that gives sense to this whole huge expensive gaudy experiment of God’s imagination
And in excepting your love
I have given you mine
And it is in this love that we are granted eternal life
In my time of dying
I will take one last look around
To see if I missed anything
And then close my eyes to what could’ve been, should’ve been
And was
For you are allowed no baggage in heaven
And yours will be the last face I see
There will be no will to find
Only the stubbornness that left me penniless
For I gave no names
To betray my brothers
For the betterment of my career
And the belittlement of me
I was always wiser in my work
Than I was in life
Thus I withdrew from life
And lived in my work
So if you ever miss me
This is where you will find me
(C) Frank Howson 2019
He came with love in his heart for every living thing. His innocence had been untouched and his light force shone so bright that crowds gathered to see him but, more importantly, to feel his warmth. By gazing upon him they were somehow changed. “Was this the Messiah?” they mumbled to each other in hushed tones lest they be deemed blasphemous by some. For some can find darkness in every hope, every wish, every prayer.
And when this man spoke it brought some to their knees, others to tears. It was as if the calmness in his voice could heal every hurt and fear that had weighed them down and they were now somehow lighter.
The taking away of such anguish even brought back sight to the blind. As if all they had needed was to believe in something and were being granted the ability to see the world anew. Men who had walked too many lonely dead end loveless roads and were now crippled, found that they could walk again. And after those first awkward unsure steps they inched closer and closer to him growing more confident and accepted with each one until they were in his arms, and the safety and strength of unconditional love made them sob for the joy of each precious moment. Time that they had, until now, misinterpreted and cursed for their burdens, and wasted, was now rediscovered and rejoiced over. All things were possible again.
In his face they saw no judgement, no impatience, no pity, only love. And his love became contagious among the people and they sang his praises.
He had not come to destroy the Romans, or hand out weapons, or preach hate. He was here to give meaning to our lives. What was the meaning of life? Love. For love opens the door to joy. And its light extinguishes all shadows.
But there were those, the shadow people, who were angered by us learning the meaning of existence and saw that this teaching could undermine their power over us. For they ruled by fear and threats, both of which were rendered insignificant when the masses walked proudly in the sun again unchained from their own mental limitations.
So they arrested this man, this dangerous man, beat him, whipped him, ridiculed him and his suffering, and sentenced him to an agonising death for the crime of telling us to love and forgive each other.
And in his final conscious moments he forgave those who had plotted his death, and the ignorant who had killed him. To this day it remains the greatest triumph of the human spirit.
Perhaps he was drawing evil into the light so that the world could recognise its face?
(C) Frank Howson 2019
Painting by Frank Howson (c) 2019
TAKE THIS MAN WHO ONCE STOOD PROUD AND TALL HIS EYES HAVE SEEN ALL HIS KINGDOMS FALL WHILE THE BLACKBIRDS PECK AT HIS HOPES AND FEARS HE CASTS HIS MIND BACK TO WHEN LOVE WAS HERE SEE THAT WOMAN? SHE ONCE CARED FOR THIS MAN BACK LONG AGO WHEN SHE HAD A PLAN BUT PLANS LIKE DREAMS ALWAYS DISAPPEAR DOES SHE STILL REMEMBER WHEN LOVE WAS HERE? NOW WE TURN OUR COLLARS TO THE WINTER CHILL NOTHING IN OUR HANDS EXCEPT MORE TIME TO KILL I RETURN AGAIN TO OUR FAVOURITE PIER AND TO ANOTHER TIME WHEN LOVE WAS HERE WATCH THE MOON IT CAN BETRAY YOUR TRUST BEFRIEND THE STARS ONLY IF YOU MUST THEY WILL STEAL YOUR HEART IN THE FALL OF A TEAR YOUR ONLY MEMENTO OF WHEN LOVE WAS HERE (c) Frank Howson 2018
Beware the man who says he’s highly principled but bad mouths you behind your back.
Beware the man who is in awe of you, then wants to be you, then realises he can’t be, then resents you.
Beware the man who tells you how much his wife is worth and what he’ll get when he divorces her.
Beware the man who turns everything into a competition to compensate for his dick size.
Beware the man who tells you he’s best at everything. They are the ones who make the most mistakes.
Beware the man who is a snob and looks down his nose at everyone yet tells you he’s a Democrat. And a highly principled one at that.
Beware the man who counts your mistakes but never his own.
Beware the man who takes a commission on something he contributed nothing to. Although he’ll tell you he’s highly principled.
Beware the man who’s so dumb he doesn’t realise you are awake to him.
Beware the man whose ego is so huge he can’t see anyone else’s point of view.
Beware the man who shares the same Star Sign as Hitler but tells you the stars have moved.
Beware the man who suffers from deep depression because he knows what he is.
Beware the man who denies the existence of God because he fears being judged.
Beware the man who is scared of himself.
Beware the man whose ambition far outweighs his ability.
Beware the man who is only nice to those he thinks may be useful.
Beware the man who was born to lose. He wants you as a friend.
(C) Frank Howson 2018
(c) photograph by Frank Howson 2018
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