May You Never
What can you do when the composer of the soundtrack
of your life dies but sit crying watching back to back
videos on You Tube of a beautiful young man
singing your history in three minute flashbacks?
A cassette tape arriving in the post that I played
in the leaky attic room until it wore out, that made
time sway and bend and prove Einstein true
in-between the weekends that you stayed.
You singing I couldn’t love you more down a scratchy
line to a freezing hilltop phone box that smelt of urine
and fags and you said I’m coming up babe and I walked
home with tears sparkling on my cheeks in the moonshine.
When we saw him for the first time in the Union bar
up at the stage, so close we could see the sweat on his guitar
neck and he looked us in the eyes and handed us a joint
and we walked home blissed and stoned following our North star.
The move south, a grinding time of work and study
and crazy weekends with friends clubbing on E’s
and he was our late night chill out man, the man we
came home to, the man who sang the dawn in to the city.
That perfect summer’s day on Jesus Green, a boy playing
May You Never to a his girl but it wasn’t me lying
there; when you heard, Sweet Little Mystery you thought
of someone else now and I was broken by that knowing.
His divorce album became ours and even though
I met another man who was kind and steady and I know
loved me, the albums stayed in the cupboard because
every time I listened to the music I still thought of you.
And the last time I saw him, bloated and pissed falling
back into the drum kit, his son helping him up shouting
it’s not his fault, and he was right, it was all of our
faults
and maybe that’s what it needed, that sort of ending.
Ilse Pedler
If you have any thoughts about this poem, Ilse Pedler would be
pleased to hear them.