No Regrets - Hungry Ambition - By @PhilipLeBrun

By Phil Le Brun

Marc asked us to end this year without any regrets. One of my deepest regrets is that I’ve fallen out of touch with some of my friends from school. Friends I used to spend every waking second with and would trust with anything. Since I’ve been back on the windy little Island I call home I reached out to one of these friends.It had, to my shame, been years since we’d shared any more than a polite ‘hi mate’. But after a pint or two we were jabbering like we were sixteen again. For a moment nothing had changed. We reminisced about the girls that never fancied us and adrenaline soaked afternoons skateboarding down lanes praying you wouldn’t meet a tractor. It was cathartic and warming. But things had changed. I no longer felt like the Millhouse to his Bart Simpson. I was left feeling sort of hollow and strangely guilty for the relative success I’ve enjoyed and some of the experiences I’ve been lucky to have since leaving school.How could a guy who managed to be the wiliest yet most veracious person I’ve ever met be living with his parents and working as a Trainee Trust Administrator in a town where nothing ever happens? I was ‘having a cow man’ so have written a short piece about him below.

Hungry Ambition

In a wind battered shack on a salt washed rock was WadeSmirky, crafty with just enough charm to appear pluckyScruffy-haired, with a hyena’s laugh and digger’s handsWho teachers hated to love and girls secretly fancied.Most comfortable on the edge of catastrophe;Trouble usually had his fingerprints all over itUntil one day he found something new; AmbitionHe licked his lips growing insatiably hungry for more.Crooked knuckles shifted from up to down,His smirk became a determined grimaceAnd our clown became a scholarWith each taste of triumph growing hungrierSnarky pundits dismissed his rise as something else;Not sparkly natural talent, but grubby hard-workThey didn’t like it when the scores were talliedStill he was restless, unsatisfied, needing more.In a hyena’s cackle he sailed to the mainlandWhere his ambitious mind craved and rumbledUntil his aspirations started to stretch beyond his reachEverything seemed to move faster, ever fasterWhen he looked around he was surroundedBy the same glossy people who looked down their nosesAt his scruffy hair and calloused hands;Hands that got him here couldn’t seem to reach furtherIn a kicked hyena’s whimper he sailed homeBack to the shack on the salt-washed rockBack to the edge of something worse than catastropheWhere he never found his appetite again.