Garbage Pile

i think i have found them,
quiet beneath my heart
grown fat with decades of silence
unpracticed and shy but mine.
i know who put them there:
distilled through music,
all in soft fingertips,
with sunshine in her voice,
she sang to me.

and then I saw that
garbage pile
at the traffic lights outside the steamy bus window
where they hid and called in whispers
and i felt them with half recognition.

they must have been mine all along,
round the corner of the lip
on the inside of the smile
in the flutter of the mind,
patient and ready to be found.

these are my words.
and this is me.