Autoreminiscence

autoreminiscence of a child placed in care

Foster parents whose roles
were ersatz except for the furnishings,
clean and solid,
there to steer our young souls
away from the confusion
that the real parents passed on
after their careers in self-hate.

the child in care remembers his parents

The bloody noses and the screaming
street-spun fights, the returning home
late nights as drunken children themselves,
telling lies and taking a pasting,
without blabbing to the police.
Sticking to these rules, they hid their
sisterhood and brotherhood states
from their own children, so lost them sooner.

the children are fostered out

They're now furnished with care, now cast
as soldiers in this new family's Hamlet,
played with breath as quick as stone.

The foster father in his shed had built
this quiet domain from cup hooks and twine,
and a rake was just a rake nothing more.
Hormones, passion and outrage
passed this shed untouched as if
weathers arising from someplace indeterminate,
that also fills the lay-bys with cowslips
and other natural littering.

A carp at the point of breath;
in the methodist church for evensong
her quavering voice flapped against
the walls in lavendered dampness,
observed by the guttersnipe foster child
who ached for the honest tang of beery air,
that filled the pavements of running away
with such poetry and flair.

There are worse things than poverty,
abuse and neglect; their names yield
more melancholy and more pain.
With their elusive forgiving, their creed
of qualifying your love in lengths
of twine and shining shoes.
To never say; this is mine.

The car trips on the Sunday, a day
of reckoning and review, when the scuffs
on shoes must be repaid in full,
by setting a broken-hearted child to sit
and bring the leather back to new.

As if you could ever bring anything back,
as if this child could ever learn
that life demanded renewal, making good.
Life's just survival beyond the pub crawl
and the spittle-drenched brawl,
just beyond the flesh curl
of a two year-old foster-child-to-be.

Wetting his bed in sweet neglect;
The pyjamas of happy animals that ride
on soft edges and perma-smiles,
these had not been off his back for
six days. Now, soaked in his own
urine that at last warmed his skin,
he survived his dreams.

When the police discovered his sister,
aged nine in the twilight
of a rich town in Sussex,
did England expect every nine year old
girl to raise her four siblings on her own?

But Andrea had failed to get
this baby some food,
and he's too young to indulge
the fantasy of the parent's promise
from the departing taxi,
the phantom time of be back soon,
eggs in the fridge
love you sweet dreams.

She sat outside on the step with a baby
half her size, rounded like a seashell
against her empty chest, she rose
and fell with prominent sobs of worry,
and tears that should have been
saved for grazed knees,
dead hamsters in shoeboxes
or her wedding day.

The falling sun to a child is slow.

The policewoman edged Andrea
and the baby
and the other two kids to the car,
nervous shepherds of sleepwalkers.

This autoreminiscence calls too many
actors and supporting crew,
and they would only make an expensive
reprise of what's already been.

Too late I surmise from this screen;
my writing's inadequate
and my motives
and my love of life
and my lack of remembered dreams
once I wake
once I uncurl.