Into The Valley

 Into the valley by The Skids 

Driving past the village pond

Perhaps we would have brought you here

Though that chapter has ended

The one that began with me crouched 

In front of the B&W portable tv

In your and mum’s bedroom

Taping Into the Valley of the Dolls by Generation X

Onto my very own radio-cassette

The one with a five-pin din for recording LPs

The end of an era 

Was it on vinyl?

Ready steady go - you’re not ready to go you tell us

You would like a nice cold beer

You want to look at a smiling face

I can’t make any more analogies anymore

To explain the hard-plastic oxygen mask 

Clamped to your face

Twisting it out of shape

Nippy the friendly CO2 level monitor

Bleeping and warning us as you struggle 

To be understood through the membrane.

The priest with his yellowing well 

Thumbed liturgical guidebook

Thrown in out of his depth

A sage fisherman’s sweater clinging to his paunch

Falling with us down the log plume

I see your face as we are sucked under

Contortedly trying to tell someone something

Then the mermaids arrive to comb your baby soft white hair

Cradling you in a grotto

Where your mother, a fiddler crab

Welcomes you with her open pincers.

Sleep tight good night

Nippy the friendly co2 monitoring ghost is silent at last

I’ll drive my mother home

In the black car you love to recline

Behind the wheel of, on cruise control

Back past the village pond

Where we would have walked you in your convalescence

Our Father in your fragile older years.

See you on the flip side.