A RAPPORT WITH MY OTHER SELVES

I am a long development

from egg to ugh,¹

a chain of snapshots

viewed in the album of my mind

or a biology textbook illustration

of the life cycle of Nicholus Hancockus,

Apodea family,

superdrone

There’s a little boy in shorts

flinging himself onto vines

that hammock old box tree tops,

reassured and resentful

that they held.

I don’t know why the grownups let us.

There’s the boy who took Hertel’s peaked cap

and tried to flush it down the kitchen toilet.

What, I ask myself,

had Hertel done

to deserve it?

There’s the moody adolescent

always bored

who found the holidays too long

and the terms eternal.

What has changed?

There’s the short-sighted cowboy in Uruguay

longing for potatoes and chairs.

I remember him as I sit in my armchair

eating these potato crisps.

My current metamorphosis

is that of a sixty-nine-year-old (nearly)

twiddling his spiritual thumbs

as he looks out over the Mersey.

But we can extrapolate other avatars:

old boy pushing a frame

down the hostile pavement;

moribund turning his head

to the wall of his life.

And then the continuity’s broken.

So many phases in this life cycle,

and all that links us is memory.

 
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1. Here pronounced as in North America - 'UG'