Poems from All Kinds of Disorder JUST LIKE THAT My father tried to make Sunday afternoons take shape. He built theatres out of cardboard boxes Fixed with fairy lights and left me To script plays with my swappets While he scrubbed the oven Or got on with the gardening. He spent one winter's weekends Building a papier-mache landscape In the garden shed; when Christmas came He set me up on a stool In the middle, with a transformer, And three new Hornby trains To run on the circular tracks We went fishing in the Arun When the sun came out; I crouched On the bank, threading lead, While he put up his chair By the car and practised speeches On the redistribution of Health Service funds, And waved when I caught something. We fell out when I was fifteen. I got home late, stoned; He screamed at me in his pajamas: Don't just stand there like some demented Jesus, Say something. Next morning, when he came To my bedroom to kiss me, I rolled away. I heard him going downstairs Honking and whistling as he wept. We don't see much of him. But I think about his funeral. It should take place in miniature, With a matchstick coffin, and posed figures On a plaster graveyard, water-coloured green. I want to watch him watching As they lower his body down. And when he's gone into the earth, Let him turn and catch my eye, They way he did one night When we both laughed at Tommy Cooper playing Hamlet On a tilting ship, and for a moment Recognised each other, in an open space Together, like some other father and son.