DEREK SELLEN

CREDO.

 

 

 

How can ‘I’ stay in touch with ‘you’? Confidently,

‘The stars above you/Know I love you,’ sings the radio.

But ‘you’ is a promiscuous, flirty word. An easy rhyme.

Don’t trust it. Trust myself instead, the ‘I’ in time.

 

Yet if each neural pulse creates a new persona,

the next one faithless to the last, where’s the guarantee

that, when time flicks its tail, I’ll recognise ‘me’?

 

Alarm-clock-early though, I get your call. So what?

All I have is the frail substance of a faceless voice,

a fabrication of the wires, coded and de-coded, noise.

 

But then we chatter  -  joking  -  and, at the just moment,

say together, our tongues marrying and chiming true,

for the first time, fleeting and for ever: “I LOVE YOU.”

 

The three syllables spiral in our ears  -  Matisse’s

dancers linking hands or Keats’s revellers on the urn  -

a molecule of verbal matter which nobody can prise apart.

How do we know if what we touch stays true?

                                                        Trust life. Trust art.