If I write the poem that remains unwritten,
include the thoughts I dare not share,
and screw it up into a ball.
This could sit at the centre of it all.
Of all the things I might have said,
and probably won’t before I’m dead,
doused with every note un-played,
arranged for each love that was never laid.
What if I took every conversation I’d ever had
with somebody that was there, but only in my head
and used that with the layer of twigs,
would that make the tinder catch the wood?
Place every place I’ve been but never stayed:
the bench on which we sat, above the bay,
when you held my arm that way.
– a moment that haunts but was never grasped –
the distant boat, the bobbing buoy, the air, the call of gulls –
our bikes leaned up behind the bench,
the water was impossibly clear that day.
Stack them up, against one another,
the driftwood words we didn’t say to one another
And all the secrets I wish I’d asked of mother
before she was gone.
The evening draws in – it’s wet, but the air is mild.
It grows in the field you played in as a child,
and if you could’ve stayed a while,
you’d see this most ridiculous pile
of everything that exists that much more in the mind.
And after chucking on all this stuff?
It’s getting big, but not big enough!
So toss on all the times, despite the rain,
we dared not sneak into the lane.
Rack the self-generated torments – the arguments I never had with a doorman.
The “what ifs” – if Iraq had not been invaded.
A smile un-smiled, the streams in which we never waded.
Then there’s the neighbours to whom I should have said hello.
and all the unexplained feelings from “down below”.
Pile ’em up and watch it grow!
I can’t strike the match, love.
The box is wet and the evening damp.
I give up too easily and bugger off.
It wasn’t a real bonfire anyway.
But up on the valley’s other side
a firework explodes
like a bomb above a town.
The next day,
either here or far away,
I find myself up again that way.
I pass, by chance, the field
in which I played as a child,
and oh – the pile is thatched and painted!
A wreath is placed upon the door.
A hedgehog lives there with a mouse.
It’s not a bonfire, it’s a house.
