Lisa’s song

Today’s optional prompt is to craft a poem that recounts an experience of driving/riding and singing, incorporating a song lyric.

Today’s resource took us on a virtual visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where I found out about a still unsolved robbery in 1990, when a dozen invaluable works of art were stolen. I borrowed a couple, and a line from this Lisa Stansfield song.

This catapulted me back to a sense of robbery I felt about the same time and which has also remained unresolved.
I was always left with the feeling that I shouldn’t host these feelings, they were not mine to feel, I was not the one being robbed – but I was, and we should talk about it.

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We drove down together to Oxford Street under cover of darkness, revealed only by the sound of our blue Peugeot’s engine, its wonky headlights and the fading moonlight illuminating the empty wet pot-holed tarmac roads.

We passed Paddy’s Wigwam, Lark Lane where the riots took place and the little betting shop where two gorillas bundled an old man into a car in broad daylight.

Oxford Street’s not there anymore. John Lennon was once carried out of its doors; now students eat cold pizza, smoke skunk and fumble through drunken sex in its old rooms while dreaming of some slightly above average future.

They would have been planning the heist about the same time. Meticulous care and consideration being applied to their plans to foil the rightful owners and take away their joys.

Museums, like wombs, house precious works of art.

Creations of breathtaking beauty, crafted in mysterious ways – miracles.

Almost.

But there’s promise, so much untold promise.

Degas promised pride and beaming smiles at the ballerina’s debut.
Flinck promised an obelisk of light to guide him safely home.
Vermeer promised family gatherings around the piano.

All gone. All stolen. All never to be seen.

I drove home alone to the sound of a bright-eyed Blackbird prising open the day with his song in the way water seeps through layers of clay to form rivers.

The CD moved on to another track and Lisa sang;

“Been around the world and I, I, I
I can’t find my baby”.

Someone shot the Blackbird.

Lead-heavy, ice-cold, silence flooded the inside of the car.
Outside, someone had driven thumbs into the eye sockets of the night and blinded every single star.
Somewhere, out beyond the imagination where space has no space to be, a black hole sucked in everything that was ever known or ever felt.
Then slammed it’s huge, steel-bolted titanic door; shut!

I stopped the car at the centre of darkness, just before the M62 begins, or ends; you choose, I couldn’t.

In the distance, Christ rode turbulent seas aboard the ship of salvation. In school they said he would save me, but he turned his back and silently stole away, never to be seen again.

“Been around the world and I, I, I
I can’t find my baby” … — …

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