I’ve been here for years.
Dust lies drifted in the polished place
where warm-bottomed
and curvaceous creatures
would once have been supported
by my kapok and red leatherette.
My seat feature,
was pride of the kitchen
when I and my mistress’ bottom
long ago first met.
Gathering dry dirt in a woody gloom,
this monotonal terminality …
cast in the home’s last room
and resting place…
decays and depresses
objects such as us
who were once allowed some grace
and functionality.
Each 15 months or so, and so
a chimney sweep
or an aerial contractor
visits us
and also now and then
a fresh discarded victim
joins our haughtily resigned community.
We make no fuss…
we are devoid of opportunity.
Old settee covers
balefully receive the chipped stares
of plastic soldiers,
the letters of old lovers
now addressing new directions,
VAT reports
in case of State Investigations,
books and papers from a time
when life was just the future
and this information could be used
somewhere along that endless line….
The pram, and then
the doll’s pram waiting
for an unlikely retro-taste
in some new toddler’s
strange or mystical demeanour….
the nappies that were outgrown,
the heavily branded lid
of the handed down
handy-pack dispenser
caught in an unfulfilled function
that doesn’t matter any more
and perhaps never did
(but it gave them something to shout about
took on meanings
it had never had before),
the broken guitar
the grotesque toaster
the fruits of work,
paintings,
all the still parts of humans
that become impossible to sever
because their physicality
goes on for ever
As useless objects we are immortal.
We lie in chinks of ginger light, beamed
where a roofing contractor may arrive
some time next summer
and we might hear him coming up the drive,
the leather-squeaking tread of him
by-passing our captivity.
So they bequeath us.
So are we rocked, in our silence
and acceptance of passivity,
by the process of forgetting
going on beneath us.