Leaving Town: Chasing dreams that run away like cats down alleys after midnight

Written by Mark Berry

Narrated by Mark Berry

A collection of poems inspired by a time of uncertainty, purpose, youth and question.
These poems were mostly written in 1989 while living in Oxford. A very small number of them were done in 1990, just as I moved to London. I had been through a difficult couple of years, but life was starting to look up again. I was on the dole, waiting to become a rock star. London seemed like the right choice, and I was done trying to make Oxford work out for me.
Hazy future
I'm not sure that I know anymore,
just what’s fair, what's right at all.
There's a long way to go on this open road,
at the mercy of all the world may throw.
I'm not sure that I feel anymore.
When my home is gone in misty stories,
my body is broken by men I don't know.
Sometimes I feel like a puppet, in a loser’s show.
I'm not sure of what I do anymore,
though I've been avoiding it for so long.
The reason’s lost, why I go on.
Can I build it back, when I keep getting it wrong?
Hazy future, yeah, it looks like another misty dawn.
I salute you - all those who carry on.
When the bed you lie on, isn't your own,
and the life you live is no longer normal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Author's Republic
• Release date: Mar 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780648327172

Mark Berry

Mark Berry grew up with stories of the sea. His father was a marine engineer and would come home on leave with tales of places like Aden, Hong Kong and San Francisco, all hugely exotic sounding to a boy growing up in 1960s Britain. After reading about the tragedies of Titanic and Lusitania , an interest in liners followed – and so started a lifetime of collecting books, ephemera and items from all kinds of ships. Now retired after thirty-eight years in the property industry, it seemed only natural for Mark to share some of the items in his collection. Mark and his wife Val have two grown-up sons and live in rural Devon with their cats and chickens. When they can, they enjoy escaping to sea on a cruise liner or, even better, an ocean liner.