NAIL IN THE HEART

A cardboard box of personal office goods was delivered to me a week after I was fired and escorted from the building.

  

First I peel the Sellotape

skin intact, pull back two abdominal flaps –

one to the right, other to the left –

peer into the dark guts

of a box of an old man’s chattels.

Where is this metaphor leading? 

Is the box me or is the stuff in it me?

I feel as I felt sifting sorting tossing

stuff from my dad’s wardrobe

weeks after he died. 

I could be dead –

all those emails of eulogy –

hundreds of them keen to say

how much they admired how

I had done the right thing.

I weep over the pathetic mundanity,

of my possessions in the box

left after my execution –

a nail hammered

through my heart.