The light of day

I found them in a folder
foully mildewed from damp,
still pressed together, face to face,
hip to hip, as they were
when I put them there
43 years ago.

Christ, the pages stank
– a rankness reaching
back almost to another grave,
a burial sacrosanct of thought
in cruelly handwritten script
interred without measured release,
painful words gouged out of a
strained relationship doomed to die
because it never knew the light of day.

We had hidden in the thankless
dark, fucked our brains out
every night as if our last
until it was.

In the lonely days that ensued
I wrote alone the hundred pages
I never dared to show. And never will.
They’ll never see the light of day.
© I.D. Carswell