Confessional Poem

I still think of you, all these years on,
from all those years we had. You
used to make us sleep with the light
on and I still do – for it feels like
switching that switch will flush
the past down the drain. That’s where
years of writing went when at the end
of our time together, you said “I don’t
want to be in it.” So I could only bin it.
All those times we went off exploring
just “to look at trees,” as you put it -
on the premise that “there should
still be room for Nature in the Future...”
I remember that I did document a
lot of it - but it’s gone. There were
inward journeys too, like a poem is the
opposite of a bus ticket - and I remember
when we drove into the Lakes from
some other place and I wrote down
every sign along the way for a poem -
how semantics is a road sign not a place!
Well, that too is gone – all the love
poems gone - and there were, well, poems
born of recreational drug use for
the sake of literary experiment, and it’s
all gone - under Gondwanaland like
the pollen, under the green hill like
the ecstasy pill. For it was all for you,
and you are no longer in my new life.
There was even one about the neo-London
skyline as a part of the Tube service,
but I was with you when I wrote it
so it too is gone. Even the dreamwork
diary I kept won’t work with you gone.
At least some of the melodies remain;
but I’m too old to make it as a pop star,
prance round in a vapid pose suitable
for the rebellion of youth – no, it is
as a poet that I wish to leave my sting.
It seems unfair that I was faithful, and
it’s all my work that’s now destroyed, but
I suppose it could be worse: I could have
grown homosexual through the onslaught.
Maybe I did and just don’t know it yet.

John F B Tucker

 
If you have any thoughts on this poem, John F B Tucker would be pleased to hear them.