Goodbye Robert
You were fourteen when you showed me off
to your mates, and one whose hair I pulled
when she came too close but never came
close again, laughed when you told her
you`d pulled my arm out of its socket
when restraining me during a
Rumpelstiltskin foot stomper-
the first of our many dislocations.
I chucked your soap on a rope
over the back fence onto the
Liverpool Street Line, at a train actually,
but missed, my arms too short for a serious lob;
and one dark night I wandered into your room,
(as Steve McQueen looked on,
blue-eyed and bemused) ,
and peed on your new sheepskin rug
when those funny pictures whispered
they`d punish me if I couldn`t hold my breath
for more than a minute under
my sweltering Superman duvet.
At eleven I bowled in to see you bare-breasted and sobbing,
your nipples like glowing embers
after my latest nephew chewed them raw,
and your old Dansette played Geno`s Tell it Like it Is.
Hello Robert, you`d say down the phone,
in a way that was like the blond actress wife
of the bloke who played the young vet
in All Creatures and was the 5th Dr Who:
bit like a gangster's moll, but non-American;
and we`d have a short, funny conversation
before I went and got mum-I think you probably
in your head had it forming in an inoperable place,
and your behaviour became eccentric…
or more eccentric than usual.
I`ll never know but I think you embraced
your great escape, and when I saw you last
in that bed in Lincoln you were in incapable
of anything apart from a crooked I`m out of here smile
and a flash of goodbye Robert in your eyes
the same colour as dads.
poem by Bob Dellar
Added by Poetry Lover
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