I want no truck with death
By Tim Loveday
Published 22 October 2025
After Pablo Neruda’s ‘Keeping Quiet’
They used to be morning poems > as in to return to the house with all the pungent fate & fear of youth only to discover that the cellar door is caved in > not with axe but lyric > in the not quite driveway my father’s hand grips the back of my neck & I confuse the axe > what then are we to make of this un/holy ritual > how the poem is both incantation & circumference of a wound > throat-song > I found my father out there looking at the night sky as if murmuration were screaming > to deny thy father & his dreaming is to board the windows with brick > is to be thy father > thy wound > prize these bodies against our woundings > my father’s hand grips the back of the axe & I confuse the lyric > Neruda says I want no truck with death > discard the with > I want no truck > no cave in > no translation > I don’t want anything to do with death > I want > cellar door > incantation > not quite driveway > morning > only the night sky & its mouth wide open as if searching for that after-tin of blood > my father’s hand grips the back of the lyric & I confuse the axe for throat >
In the opening passage to Terrence Real’s seminal text on masculinity, I Don’t Want To Talk About It, he writes, ‘As other fathers have done to their sons, my father—through the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, the quality of his touch—passed the depression he did not know he had on to me just as surely as his father had passed it on to him—a chain of pain, linking parent to child across generations, a toxic legacy.’
‘I want no truck with death’ is an abstract meditation on this ‘chain of pain’, the relationship between male depression and intergenerational violence, and how this ‘toxic legacy’ has been both subverted and cemented in my poetry. While many see poetry as therapeutic, ‘I want no truck with death’ troubles this idea, presenting the poem as both ‘incantation and circumference of a wound’, then later an ‘axe’ confused for a ‘throat’. Ostensibly, the speaker recognises the uncomfortable duality of the poem: a yearning for an escape from violence & depression and yet a simultaneous return to violence & depression, a reconstitution of them, a reclamation of them.
Humorously, the title ‘I want no truck with death’ is found only in the translation of Pablo Neruda’s poem ‘Keeping Quiet’ (translated by William O’Daly, 2008), with the original Spanish edition making no mention of a truck. The translation, at least according to Google, is more accurately, ‘I don’t want anything to do with death’. Either way, it captures how I feel about patriarchal inheritance: I’m sick of seeing death in myself & in the world all around me.
The aim of this project is to share lived experiences of mental health via poetry. Therefore, some of the workshop content may potentially trigger some readers. If you require mental health support or assistance, you can call the Wellways Helpline plus a list of free confidential 24/7 support lines can be found here. You are not alone in your journey.