The Invisible Force

She seemed cross and said
'I've only come back for one reason
and that is to deliver you to the Talbots' house'
just like back in the day
  'because they live on a hill
   and you can't be trusted
   to drive up,
   or down, or park
   on a hill'
certainly that much had been proven
viz. Dawkins vs Holloway 1988

Yet they had summoned us from the decades past
and so we were duty bound to attend
I said it's good to see you after 15 years dead
I guess you don't get many invocations

She said it's 'invitations' and
'I have had several calls actually
which I'm not at liberty to discuss'

I said please keep your eyes on the road,
as we tore round the old primary school corner
where once we hung out the car windows
singing Carpenters songs
on the last day of our innocence

Now as we have established
we were heading to the Talbots
but moreover to the map-hidden garden
- rope bridge, sunken pool -
which ran behind their house
where I only once visited aged nine

After my first game of Scrabble
in which I played, and some say invented,
the word, perhaps the concept, of ID
just 9 points with triple word score
but which concluded the game
after a heated discussion and dictionary consultation

I may have thought in my naivety I'd played
id as per the contraction for
'I had 'I did' 'I would'
it was my first game ... but more pertinently
we all learned about "the part of the mind
in which innate instinctive impulses
and primary processes are manifest"

And then we played football in the secret garden
- shell grotto, bamboo tunnel -
with me as junior Scrabble champ, and
where we were headed now in her
vintage yellow Mini, special guest resurrection

Roaring into Stafford Hill
where the glamorous Talbots live(d)
pilot dad, boutique owning mum,
guitar wielding older brother, and
Edward call me Ed who
was the coolest little dude in school

But we sped past the Talbots' house
and were drifting towards the kerb
going too fast downhill, I yelled
WAKE UP! MUM, WAKE UP!
and reached for the steering wheel