Song to My Siren

Your bleach blonde hair and kohl black eyes

Got on the bus at Barking Station

I was lost, you heard my cries

Drowning in a sea of trepidation

First threads of friendship recognised

A unique and wondrous combination

Out of our depth and unaware

What beliefs and hungers we would share

With no one else. They’d never know

How our strange bond could ever grow

 

This special bus down the A13

Went to the swamp, know what I mean?

To the Thames, not where the aspens quiver

But where simple life crawled from the river

Slid through mud and left skid marks

Evolved into export shipping clerks

 

Incessant chatter, Cockney patter

Perhaps an absence of grey matter

People buying council houses

Cinzano Bianco, chiffon blouses

Off down Madison’s Friday night?

Don’t go no more, got in a fight

Billy Bonds or Samantha Fox?

Weren’t it great when we worked at the docks?

A very extra special bus

Alright for them but not for us

 

We talked each day of Siouxsie Sioux

Of colleagues let out from the zoo

Of Thatcher’s evil shades of blue

Of bills of lading for Kinabalu

Not knowing what the hell to do

To escape this place or go cuckoo

Up shit creek without a canoe

 

A smile to launch container ships

Bursting from your cherry lips

So, so easy to make you laugh

Always making me laugh too

I loved the way we shared that laughter

No other made me laugh like you

 

And you sang

Songs I’d never heard before

My goth and punk music mentor

Wonderful records that are stored

In this old head for evermore

 

Eventually we both jumped ship

To sail off on some other trip

An end to awful office days

We each went our own separate ways

 

Something I said and something I did

That left me wondering…

 

For four decades I wondered

 

Some nights I dreamed about you

Dreams in which you dreamed of me

And I searched

And I searched

And when I found you

You had gone

Oh, my heart

Torn apart

By this hopeless sorrow

 

A bit of explanation:

I found the ABC Tales website purely by accident. A member of my family suffers from borderline personality disorder which I was trying to learn more about by searching the internet. Among the results I found a newspaper article about a dear, dear friend who I worked with in the offices of a container shipping company in Essex long ago. She had died in recent years as a result of being given totally incorrect medication for this same condition whilst under the care of the Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. I was not just horrified but also saddened beyond belief, and remain so to this day.

More searching on the web eventually brought me to this site where this beautiful woman had been a member, contributing many wonderful poems and prose. I read them all. I bought her book that had been published posthumously by her family. All her work seemed to have been written long after I had known her in the mid-1980s but so much of it, along with the photographs, triggered memories of her and those happy times we had had together as friends.

It has taken me almost two years to write this poem, finding it extremely difficult at times to choose the right words without becoming engulfed in sadness. I think my lines are appropriate and I really hope that any of her friends and family who may read them will think the same.

I knew her as Julia but here her user name is Overthetop1.

 

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Image:

Every image I use is from a photograph I have taken myself. 

On this occasion – The front of my very old Siouxsie and the Banshees tour tee-shirt. It’s tattered and torn beyond belief, but I could never throw it out.