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  • (Born With) All The Happiness You Will Ever Need
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(Born With) All The Happiness You Will Ever Need

Stephen Keeler

After Sam Riviere

an early Beatles’ lyric on a Sunday afternoon
that’s yellow as an egg-yolk
bright as a blackbird’s eye
and through the window Hillman Minxes
and the two-tone Austin Thirteen Hundreds
dropping out of sight
in line across the humpback bridge
become a fairground ride
beside the saltsprayed peeling whelk-stall
where the Portobello teddy boys displaced
are leaning and avoided and buffoon
and leer and keep checking their reflections
in each others’ plastic sunglasses
as though in search of something unidentified
with nervousness and anger and
with telstar and the waltzer
screaming hi-ho silver lining
as the two of you delirious with a dedication

you’ll recall when you’ve forgotten

all the words to all the songs

undress each other in the half-light


Stephen Keeler

Tags:

memory music

About this poem

This poem was chosen by Aoife Lyall as part of the Scottish Poetry Library’s ‘Champions’ project, a guest curatorship programme to help extend our national reach.

Lyall says, ‘Stephen’s poem is one of energy and dynamism and exuberance: it captures a moment full of vitality and is unafraid to recognise both the joy and sadness such personal revelations offer.’

Keeler says, ‘I nurture a sort of theory (too grand a term, really) that we are born with everything we’re ever going to need, and maybe everything we’re ever going to have. Happiness is there to be recognised or ignored or squandered or abused… and I’m not sure that we have much say in what happens to it.’

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Stephen Keeler

Stephen Keeler is an award-winning poet based in Ullapool, whose work is widely published in magazines, journals and online. He received a Scottish Book Trust New Writing Award in 2015. His pamphlet While You Were Away is published by Maquette Press,...
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