The Silent Valley

Born in nineteen-seventy.

Salvation Army hospital for 

an unmarried mother.

Twelve weeks work and a baby born for free.

For some reason

you decided to keep me,

like a pointless present,

left in a drab, dusty,

chest of drawers,

rarely used or opened.

A tot terrorised

in a two and a half storey maisonette,

somewhere between the new Ikea store 

and the slum clearances

of Leeds

in the Don Revie years.

Then, at some point,

between,

being twenty-five

and

driving through the Silent Valley

in two thousand and two,

I lost my mind in the Mourne Mountains.

Taking tablets twice daily since my forty-second birthday,

four thousand

three hundred and

eighty pills later,

I rattle like 

the Captain’s collection tin

on a wet Whitsunday

in Bramley.