What Did You Get For Mental?

What Did You Get For Mental?
my father sternly asked each night.
Ten, I said, and seldom lied.

I sat in his study after dinner
reading hidden comics, and waiting
for the call: Show Me Your Homework.

In the drawers of his desk
where I was not permitted
I often found strange toys:

Latin grammars; cheque-book stubs
neatly tied; a blue inkpad and stamp,
marked not negotiable;

and once, in its own deep drawer,
a pencil, deep bruise-purple,
mysteriously marked: indelible.

To ask was to confess,
but inside his Shorter Oxford, this:
incapable of being erased.

Someone Has Been Using My Stamp,
he announced that night. Someone
Has Broken My Pencil.

In my homework book
were purple bruises,
incapable of being erased,

and vast cubist cities,
legoed from just two words:
not negotiable.

Confiscated, those blue-prints lie
in his desk drawer still, perhaps,
sealed in a bag marked Exhibit A,

or B, or Z, and labelled in his hand
which never fades: whatever
you have written, you have written.