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Sally Slater

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Wallpaper

I sat with headphones on, music loud,
eyes closed.
A blacker blackness crossed my lids
and made me look.
My daughter waved the phone and whispered
‘It’s Granny’.   I shook
my head and grimaced.
Once again my baby got me off the hook.

I can no longer bring myself to listen
to the unspoken messages
underlying the spoken and the silence,
broadcast on the family wavelength.
Jung called it ‘the whispering of the walls’.
The three of us tuned in
one by one by one,
through the crackle and static of the years,
to our parents’ refrain:
‘Be like wallpaper.
Don’t make us listen to you.
We only hear our own pain’.

When I was twelve, my brother took pills.
He heard the whispering of the walls too loud,
he couldn’t tune it out.
He died.

Be like wallpaper.
How could we have lived the myth
that this was what we had to do?
In the end he brought down the walls
And blasted us all into the blue.

Page(s) 57

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