My Mausoleum

after a cartoon by Tom Gauld

is a teensy-weensy bookshop

no wider than its own front door.

Always has a queue of eager readers

entering one at a time.      They may feel

themselves too close for comfort.

But find my suggestions

are more than worth the proximity.

 

Or so I have been told.

 

It would be impolite to say

otherwise. For this is England,

where all is said     and done     and dusted.

So few shelves, so many tongues

to hold.      Yet each book chosen means

no-one goes empty-handed.

When my time comes, please seal me there

 

asleep in this uproar of language.

 

vi. 2025

The smell of stored apples

 

We knew full well it was a risk

to go back there. Break in.

No one would guess, you said. The old place

still vacant after all, porch light left on

as if to measure nightfall.

 

And knowing how to reach its bolt

the gate, hinge-loose, squeaked open.

A kind of mock welcome.

The grass gone soft where no feet passed,

trees grown crooked, or perhaps just older.

 

Inside the shed the air was sour

with smell of stored apples, long eaten.

Half-clenched, one soil-caked glove

lies on the workbench, a sleeping fist.

An unlaced pair of boots, gaping.

 

Already junk mail curls in the hall,

like unburnt leaves at a bonfire’s edge.

Cold tea stains cling to that cracked mug

left on the kitchen sill.

Dust collects. Our cast-off skin.

 

Briskly tucked in a mantelpiece

your last scrawled shopping list.

What it said, I didn’t ask – the silence was too full.

We touched nothing.

When dawn’s rain came, we swallowed

 

and were gone.

 

vi. 2025

 

painting: 'A Pair of Shoes' - Vincent van Gogh (1886)