Your life is a quiet piano,

So many brilliant keys that never got played.

It was like that for your father too,

Rats eating away at the strings

Of a derelict cello

In the privacy of a basement flat.

Someone in the family’s got to be musical,

To try out a quaver or a semi-tone,

To risk going out on a stave.

Otherwise it will be like a disappointing fugue,

Too many voices coming together

And reminiscing about what could have been,

Repeating a pattern of the half-begun

Only to abandon it later.

Surely there’s some instrument no-one has tried yet,

Perhaps on oboe or a clarinet,

The bright reedy sound of breath,

Still wrapped in a velvet case,

Waiting for its first solo.

It was not ours,

the white jade bear,

his taciturn back

his thoughtful paws

diligently going somewhere.

But it felt like we knew him

and should have taken him home.

What he had his eye on

was a kind of loyalty

which meant that it didn’t matter

if he never found it.

Unlike the emperor

whose love was so military,

he built a model army to die with

to protect him in his sleep from eternity.

Let’s not fight anymore.

Let’s leave these tomb-treasures

for someone else to find,

unfinished, undisturbed, unkept.

Two thousand years from now,

breath against glass,

some other couple

will feel the museum talking to them.

Somehow ingrained, the question

Have you got to make a living?

Routine is a hostile engine.

I can’t mend cars

Or take pleasure in repetition.

It’s not as bad as all that, you said,

It will come with practice.

But didn’t poetry upset you sometimes?

Which city did you see over Bow flyover

When you got up to go to the factory at five,

Did you ever feel lost in the night-fridge,

Carrying some unknown freight,

Perhaps another country or another’s past,

The gradual sun dirtying the skyline

And some faint nostalgia emerging

From the endless council bricks –

Which you couldn’t quite attend to

Because you were going to your place of work

And by the time you got there

It was daytime anyway?

What is your worst fear, you said,

As if I had a choice in the matter.

This, I suppose.

That you eavesdrop on your own life

But find out nothing worthwhile

And the time for speaking has passed

And listening too.