The parcel arrived with the postmark of Moscow stamped

across the brown,

undisturbed wrapping,

containing digital

information, music that had caught my ear as I surfed online

for something new to enthuse my world once more.

Unlike the day I first read Das Kapital, now residing on a dusty shelf

next to my Great-grandmother’s Gold leaf Guernsey Bible,

a copy of the Koran, the best of Punch and a much loved

set of drumsticks, yours by far the best as they slowly splinter

and decay as we all must.

The Torah stands to the left of The Koran, separated

by a copy of The Maltese Falcon, adorned in a light bronze,

a rememberance of a holiday I wish I could do again and standing guard,

invisible fist drawn in place of daggers, a small, plastic

representative of Stuart Pearce in England White, not

City Blue.

The same shelf holds a picture of me at twenty-one

beside the Liberty Bell, signalling the locked in prison sensation I

feel when I see the picture of Inukshuk, partially framed

in cardboard but prouder that the picture of Inverness

that adorns the wall on the landing.

Every representation I can think of, every culture

that has caught my eye and grabbed my soul, all laying in wait

for the final sound of entropy as it creeps in the door, scattering

the determined bulbous spider, heavily pregnant, black,

slowly falling apart but still able to spin a web to catch

a dying woodlouse, the crumbling ruins of all, the crisscrossed

smattering of brain cells, the faltering stages of synaptic

misfire, all are encased in the small and beautiful

Memento mori that awaits the signal that we must

all wait for a new addition,

from a post office in the heart of Moscow.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015