Kenny Knight

 
I want my teddy bear back,
the one the dustman took away for burial
to teddy boy bear heaven.
The one who sat on the back of the lorry
looking out in dumb indifference
as Duncombe Avenue
and Little Dock Lane slipped past.
 
This was in the era
when Elvis Presley sang to us
teddy bear song after teddy bear song
in the days after Sam Phillips
and Presley’s slow slide from integrity.
 
I was quite young then, and innocent.
My visible friend became invisible,
and spent the next few nights
wrapped in a newspaper shroud
on the far side of the coal shed,
a hundred yards or so as the plastic crow flies
from the box-room where I slept dreaming
of Grand-daughter Grizzly’s homecoming,
like a war hero from the toy hospital
draped in an American flag
from Theodore Roosevelt’s collection.
 
This was before I discovered
the only beds the toy hospital had
were mattresses from generations of sleep
and that no toy ever came back,
once it had crossed over Laira Bridge
into the afterlife of childhood
where sunlight reflects collectively
off cracked and broken Brylcreem jars
representing the downside
of living in a consumer society.
 
The rough and tumble of children at play
condemned the bear to spend eternity
wedged between a fridge and a coffee table.
 
At the council dump you get
a different kind of funeral director.
 
This was my first encounter with loss.
The teddy bear who never came back,
who may or may not have died in a toy hospital
in a bed next to a hippopotamus or circus clown.
Sadly I believe the latter to be untrue,
although I prefer the image of inanimate objects
on the brink of breath.
 
I waited until the sunset after next
before I fell asleep in the arms of a giraffe,
or was it a donkey on wheels?
I can’t remember all the toys I went to bed with.
I was so promiscuous.
Was it a giraffe or was it a cuddly raven?
Two big black arms in the sky of my sleep.
 
Grand-daughter Grizzly went missing in the summer holidays,
shortly after my discovery of a frog, crossing the backyard
one morning, on its way to breed in Ernesettle Creek.
 
I wanted to keep the frog in a bucket of water
inside Buckingham Shed Zoo.
My father helped it escape this prison
by promising it would return that autumn
from its marriage bed of mud.
 
This was my second encounter with loss.
 
The frog moved into the shadows
of the cabbage patch,
 
distancing itself from my father’s little green lie.
I thought about the frog until September
brought October and distraction.
 
Maybe it returned and maybe
it moved from pond to pond
splashing its seed around
avoiding small boisterous boys
who played centre forward
in the mud and rain of the football season.
 
Maybe it passed through in the dead of night,
attracting moths with its bright eyes and sticky tongue.
 
Maybe it ran off with Grand-daughter Grizzly
and taught her to catch dragonflies.
Maybe they cohabited down on the creek,
moving into a hut of mud
to spawn future generations of amphibious bears.