Body-on

There are people of all kinds
Looking for their ancestors

They have bits of history
Sticking to their lives like polythene windows

That are inexplicable
Times within times within

Pictures out of the comic books of the past
Like sticky patches of extra clothes stuck on their skin

Chromosomes within chromosomes
Messages written into messages that body on

One day you get an inkling
Of a matching photo fit in your gallery of lost faces

You go to an address and find
An old room where an ancestor carved his roast

And it was in you and being in you
It was in what you did and where you went

Tracing some event that you don’t see properly
A still-life in your life painted by a great grandfather

Like travellers we hop from stage to stage
Theatrical part works made of the past

And we find an old diary of a life
And we read about the things we suspect are miracles

Left to us in light of death
In the continuum of life’s strange disappearance

And so, when we’re feeling lost
With many loses to our bill that we cannot pay

we Get out our bits of family history
and Follow them into the leftovers of place and time

Yes, you say, an ancestor came to this town a long time ago
And left his time-and-place in your soul