I want to give you something you can use.
Some word from the brink of the abyss,
that will keep you from here.
But honestly, Hannah, anyone,
I got here by virtue of my ignorance.
I have learned nothing.

I drink so much. Too much.
From time to time I lose myself, in hope of finding someone else.
I thrust into woman after woman,
I down glass after glass,
but all that happens is fatigue.
A tiredness of reaching cliche.
A disappointment, of being another man propping up a bar
In another town on the outskirts of everywhere.

When I was young
I felt a majesty.
There was a song woven into everything.
Sometimes I catch the tune,
but that's all it is.

I'm sorry that I cannot give you anything of use.

From day to day,
I'm in a den of thieves,
Or I'm rubbing shoulders with the most powerful leaders on earth,
Or I'm addressing crowds of thousands,
Or I'm secreted away in my bed,
lamenting the loss of some imagined time.
It counts for so little.
So little.
I cannot boast,
Because it all means so little.

I don't deny there may be something in the flesh.
There was a time, seven years ago,
when I was the melody that played
between thighs and breasts and cunts and cocks
and women sang my praise.
There was a time
when I stood upon the highest mountain of West Africa
blood upon my shirt,
and saved.
I did that.
I really did all that.
And still,
When the cameras role,
and your favourite TV personality brings out the question,
there is nothing good to say,
nothing real to say,
except
'It all means so little.'
It all means so very not so much.

I don't wish to dissuade you
from living the life you planned
but please, I implore you,
just find someone you love.
More than that,
find those who can love,
who can find in you the melody that matters.
Because you search everywhere,
and anywhere,
and you will find nothing better
than to love,
and to be loved,
and so sayeth the Lord.

I don't know what's left for me.
I compose my songs.
I know that I can write words that will sell
and I know that I can be comfortable,
even well off.
But it's the conceit of the world to know
it will never be enough.
I have to learn humility.
I have to return to the slum.
I do not come here in charity,
to hold your dying child.
I do not come here, for adventure,
to watch the rebels wreak their havoc.
I come here because I am no good there.
I come here, because I don't know myself there:
In London, with something to my lips,
inhaling, or licking,
for the want of a better idea.

I believe that you can be better.
I believe that you are not so constrained
by the paralysing self-reflection
or the insatiable desire to be some kind of god.
If you can play football on a hill
overlooking some post-industrial northern town
and retire for tea with the children
counting your blessings and thinking nothing of the killers
in South Sudan,
then I say you are on your way.
You are on your way to living some kind of life.
You are on your way to being some kind of person,
the kind you read about in history books,
the kind you'd hope to be your mother and your father.

Me, I'm the cunt on the beach watching a murder.
I'm the cunt overhearing the suicide by the bridge.
I'm stuck in the impossible bureaucracy,
I'm bewitched by the Prussian bohemian beauty,
I'm the autodidact, amidst the plague,
forever on the cusp of nothing great.

I don't know if I have a legacy.
I want to leave you this:
forget about almost everything.
Find someone to love,
and be loved.
It's so simple,
so fucking impossible,
so simple.

I have walked where you might wish to walk.
I have spoken to the most high.
I have been to all those countries,
loved those women, those men,
touched those bodies
you imagine might be enough.
Listen:
you can never get enough.

I am not preaching surrender,
to be happy with your lot.
I am preaching transcendence.
It doesn't matter, for one moment,
what you've got.
You can never get enough.
Be more than that.
Want less than that.
Be inhale, and exhale.
Be the tide receding under moon.
Be God, walking in the garden,
Be forever, a love and an endeavour
to be holy.
Be fine.
Be alive.

I know it's shit.
I know it's nothing practical.
But I was there, on Calvary,
and I was there, when the West Side Boys were blown to kingdom come.
It is better,
and it easier,
to be something smaller,
something simpler,
something more or less of love.

Forgive me.