PIN HEAD

PIN HEAD

PIN HEAD

Close your eyes.
What’s left is practically
the shape and size of the head
of a pin.

Gleaming, round, smooth, it resembles nothing
so much as a highly-charged dance floor
for atoms done up to the nines
where you chassis ecstatically (as you seldom did in life)
with your beloved in your arms.
You turn with your mother in your arms.
You are spinning with your father in your arms.
Every love you’ve ever known, however brief or shaming,
long-gone grandparents, teachers, friends, even the odd family dog
is clasped in your arms as you take a turn round the floor
to quickstep, waltz, the Shimmy and the Hippy Hippy Shake,
while the indefatigable band plays over
the rhythm of your pulse.

All this turns
on something the size of the head of a pin
and it is stuck
alongside a myriad of others
in the dark pincushion of interstellar space

which is kept in a corner of the sewing box
of something so vast and forgetful
it seldom remembers to sew

like your Mother who sits all morning
looking out the window at the passing show,
a few buttons short
on the cardigan she has had so long
she has no idea where it came from,
or when she last looked inside
that sewing box in the corner.

She remembers this much: in the War,
people died, and they all loved to dance
and lived when they could, from the heart.