Then I am eleven
playing Asher,
a cricket-ball-stung
hand, swimming pool
trepidation when
everybody else bounds in
with shouts that rocket
off from the tiles.

Then I am sixteen
and our deputy head,
on the brink of expelling
tears, leaves when we do,
an exercise book graffitied
with wish-you-wells,
faded shirt acrostic
in blue marker.

Then I am eighteen
complimenting a stranger
on their coat (now they
are a poet), stitches
for buses in the place
they demolished,
first attempt at a villanelle
in a room of twenty.

Then I am twenty-six
and a friend starts
to share a life
with a signature, online
ultrasounds, letters from
America, a manuscript,
library-printed, spiral-bound
posted north for a score.

Then I am twenty-nine,
coffee in hand,
reeling off names that haven’t
lined my throat for a decade,
reduced to pixels on a screen,
you doing the same,
wondering where they went,
where we are going.