Sad Streets and Side Streets
My dad is a sad man—
I’ve said this in another poem
only it wasn’t me, it was Dad
pretending to be me
which is a thing he does.
(that said I have thought it before,
more than thought, I know he’s a sad man)—
but I don’t think of him as an unhappy one,
at least no unhappier than the rest of us.
His sadness is a poetic sadness
(whatever the hell that means),
a, for him, source of inspiration.
Wordsworth has his daffodils, Larkin, his deprivation—
why on earth would Dad imagine I’d know that?—
and Dad,
who he would like to believe I believe
is right up there with the aforementioned,
his sadness.
What is sad, so terribly sad, is Dad writing this.
He never shows me his poetry anymore and
although I’ll save his big red book of poems when he dies—
that is a given:
the poems and the SylvaC rabbits and my “graduation” photo—
he knows full well
I’ll likely never get round to reading them.
I suppose one day he’ll write a poem about that.
Be right up his street.
Jim Murdoch lives down the road from where they filmed Gregory’s Girl which, for some odd reason, pleases him no end. He’s been writing poetry for fifty years for which he blames Larkin. Who probably blamed Hardy.