‘Time is a perfect circle
Where it ends, it curves back in,
Starting a whole new cycle
Where the other one begins,
We cannot escape our futures, nor
Much less, escape our past,
The things that we’ve run away from
Will be waiting there, at last.’

That’s what he said to Jennifer
As she packed her final case,
And carried it out to the taxi,
‘I don’t want to leave a trace!
I’m parcelling up the memories
That I shared so long with you,
And dropping them off at the station,
Locked forever, on platform two.’

And Derek had looked forsaken as
She passed out through the door,
She’d said their love was mistaken
It had gone, forevermore.
‘Don’t look, enquire, or ask for me
Or you’ll still be waiting yet,
The one thing that will stay with me
Is that I wish we’d never met.’

And so she passed on out of his life
A marriage of thirteen years,
A time of strife with a testy wife
And a basketful of tears,
He tried to cling to the better times
That were fading in his head,
He only knew that he loved her still,
Though he wished that he was dead.

When Jennifer rode away that day
She had thought, ‘At last, I’m free!
I’m going to live my life the way
That I hoped my life would be.’
She thought of her husband’s final words
As his heart began to rend,
‘Just know that I love you, Jennifer,
I’ll be with you in the end.’

She moved to a whole new neighborhood
And she spurned her former friends,
Went with a whole new clique of folk
Who had never made amends,
There wasn’t a single married pair,
They were all divorced, or spent,
Adrift in the dim-lit bars like her
In search of what life meant.

But when the news of his passing came
She was pensive for a while,
She planned to go to his funeral
And forgot for a day to smile,
He hadn’t been able to countenance
A life where his love had gone,
And left a note with a single quote,
‘I’d best be moving on!’

She drifted on for a few more years
In her false, gay party hat,
With nobody there to wipe her tears
As he’d done, when times were flat,
When time brought on some dread disease
And she knew that her time was spent,
Whose hand would pay for her funeral,
Not one, and nobody went.

They had to open her husband’s grave
That he’d paid in the years before,
When life for him had been content
‘Til death do us part,’ he swore,
And as her coffin was laid on his
In that dismal outback track,
It was then I heard but a whispered word,
‘I knew you’d be coming back!’

David Lewis Paget