Deep in the Basement of my Brain

Deep in the basement of my brain

I keep my dreams – a library

Of lantern-slides and photographs

Of all the presences and places

From my childhood times.   And there by night,

Prowling the corridors of sleep, my thoughts unravel,

Fingering the shelves;  looking for clues

For any reason why

I had to leave my little kingdom,

My infant realm,  my sweetest Eden –

Be conscript in this adult world –

Trained to ape their alien ways

And taught to live their language.

I did not understand my elders,

They wished on me a world I did not want

That they too did not want yet had endured

They had too early learned defeat,

And had left it too late for mutiny.

I knew my world with instant eyes

Before I had an alphabet,

Felt it, tasted, had no fear –

Played my part upon that vivid stage

In that sweet season had no need of words

But the present will not match the past.

And now by night I improvise

In the laboratories of sleep

Piecing clips of the silent past

Vainly trying to revive

The natural wonder of that buried time.

But the fragments will not run together,

The patterns are scattered past all repair

There’s no translation from the then to now,

But the puzzlement and hurt remain

Through all my nights and days.

Rive as you will at ivy on a wall

The rootlets cling to the brickwork

And so the imprints of that time persist

To underpin the structure of my being.                                                                

Indifferent time drifts dust upon the past

Yet still there glints a spark amid the silt

That trips the hidden shutters of my mind

Reveals that still I dream of Eden.