I will wait here.

I will wait precisely in this cabinet,
Until you prise it open
In that delicate curiosity
That is lost in ‘today’.

My words are more patient than myself.
I know that now,
I think I always did.
It is why I love and

Why I love so patiently.

I will wait so gladly in my place,
Until poetry is fashion once more.
It is a sure case
In a sorry state.

Hearts that beat too fast
And breaths that are too frequently
Forsaken for a foolish enterprise
Of some invested individual

Sat watching behind a blast screen.

I will wait here and think back.
To remember the fuzzy nothing
Of my childhood mind. I recall little
But the polarities. The spaces of life

That intercede mere existence.
I bask in these doctored images of a past
That I never quite had. A fatherless summer
Forgotten instantly in garage top vigils,

Kicked footballs and years that were endless.

I wonder if my words will last longer
Than the etchings of your gravestone.
I wonder more so whether you would
Approve of them and how much I would

Have cared if you did not. A father is lost
And is abstract for me. Like God,
An ever-present utterance of nothing at all
Or perhaps everything that I am

Or could possibly ever be.

I wonder whether my love of words
Is nothing but a longing for permanence
In a world that has forever shown me
Futility. I have read of it in your name

Again and again through till now,
And thenceforth years to come. Your name,
How it needs to mean something,
Your voice, your ‘I’ through the ages,

For it envelops me within it - we are the same Mr.

It is within your void that I search for a father.
An ancestor to tell me who I am
And from where I have come. The plight of the
Ape-men that have been, their legacies

Wrought in blood-stained gold
But also in each yellowing poem
And from the hand prints on cave walls.
These are the will of my fathers,

The trinkets on my mantelpiece.

It is within you all that my words
Remain patient. It is within you all
That my will remains clear. For I know now
(Or perhaps I always did)
That there is a voice amongst us.

It may sleep through the noise of today,
All-talk and no communication. It may sleep
Right on through until we awake. Our eyes
Will burn for staring at the screens,

But our hearts will sing for their reprieve.