Your Story

(Downsizing: December 2013)

Your life in a lorry – 

And our black panic

Clambering over the past,

The bagged detritus:

Its indiscriminate maw

Churning the jetsam,

The now unloved

Outmoded dark wood,

Dark-stained duvets,

Obsolescent videos,

Which rolled and heaved

Beneath us.  ‘Stop!’ you cried,

As my scrabbling foot plunged

In a chasm between cast-offs.
 

But I couldn’t stop.

Couldn’t stop myself 

Weeping the loss of your past.

The stories, the songs –

‘Annabel’,

‘I’m Going to Cry’.

Already crying.
 

And letters: later you told me

The loss – the one written back-

Wards, so you had to read it

In a mirror.  The ones from me

You found, all of them,

A plastic bag of mother-love,

Pulled from oblivion.

 

Curious to see a life

Stuffed into carriers:

Sainsburys – stories;

Lidl – letters.

Still the murdered words

Churn inside the lorry,

Chasm where the life

Once told

Tumbled, rolled,

Its knell tolled

Into oblivion.

 

‘Stop!’ you cried.

And so the past

Sinks deep into our dark.

Close the van door.

In my head I secrete

All that I love.  Plunge

Foot forward into

Our future -