I should warn you
   I am made of glass
spli nters for fingers
one touch and there’ll be
                                            a wicked
                                                          ­                  
                                                                ­                                   crack

as part of me ruptures
like a wound breaking     open
   again


you can paint me
   whichever colour you like
but whether I’ll stay that way

is     another     question

and that’s all there’ll be

questions dro
                  ppi
                  ng like hail

with a thunderous          smack
and sandcastle answers

sturdy at first
but quick to cr
                         um
                          ble

in the brittle          distance

                                      ­                                                             of a second

and then you’ll have a child,
the first of maybe a trio
of slippery-skinned
shrieking new humans.
Over a bunch of months
you’ll watch the globe
inside your partner expand,
family members placing
a hand above the navel
to feel a kick, a thud
to incur a exclamation of glee,
at the idea of a person
on the edge of expulsion,
an uncooked multi-limbed being
you helped invent.

Then there will be nights of no sleep,
the traipsing to the cry
of your writhing baby,
all tears and open mouth bawl,
hoping you’ll supply
a response to pacify the mind.

There’ll be a morning
when you peer in the mirror
and see a single thread
of silvery hair
or tiny crimson quivers
in the whites of your eyes
and your child
will ****** a picture
to your chest
crammed with crude scribbles
of a sunny scene
and you’ll wonder
if it will ever be real again.

One day
you'll turn over
in the bed you bought together
in the bedroom you rent together
surrounded by items
that are now 'ours' and not 'mine'
as the first light
stutters across her cheek
and you'll wonder
if this is how
it will always be
the grey familiarity
infecting you
like a go-to drug
that doesn't do the job
so well anymore

your kiss
is my snowflake

no two the same
and yet to fall

like a word nobody utters
in case they say it wrong

the others are like kites
tiny blue specks

blending in with the clouds
or a car in the fast lane

watching countryside
***** by in an avocado slush

there’s a lexicon
to be discovered

while fragile words
stain friends like coffee

if they’re not careful
or allow themselves

to be cracked
as a lightbulb on the floor

Lost it.
Lost. It.
That’s what he said.
Lost it, last night, her place.
Not a phone or the house keys,
you know what.
Mutual, so that was a relief.
It was the lunchtime
that sent them all flocking.
A horde of eyes honed in on him,
excitement swimming in the air,
questions ready to hop
off from their tongues.
Nothing unexpected.
It is what it is, what we were taught.
He felt glad, a burden, a flaw
wrenched out from him
as though a sickness
swept away from within.

He said he wasn’t one of them anymore,
as though he’d moved into a new club
where this was the norm,
weekend gettings-it-on in bedrooms
riddled with indie-rock band posters
and a floral bedspread.
I asked him where he’d lost it.
Would he ever get it back,
like a football
punted into a hedge long ago?
A quizzical look.
I thought of everybody I knew
losing things, dropping that word
from their dictionaries
and scrawling something new
with a new body,
a sensation never quite like the first time.
Years disappeared,
myself the blank domino
among the pack.
I wonder if he can recall her name.
I didn’t admire him.
I was still one of them,
still am one of them
but there are no sighs.
It is only a moment of a moment
in a chapter in a story
that has yet to begin,
and I’ll decide
when the page is turned.

You're off again
and I'm left with residues
like fingerprints on a frosty window

I see bubbles everywhere
all too temporary
awaiting their rapid deaths

you're part of the transparent clique
glistening - unavailable
another noiseless vanish

(her name washes up on the shore
my private shipwreck
except I'm not the only one
who knows
there's no blue smudge on my thumb
from where she spilt her breath

blossoms elsewhere
stop yourself before the vowels
bleed through)

and you choke on the smoke
of your past

The man who scored a hat-trick
is having a baby. OK, he’s not,
his girlfriend is. A baby.
They’re all having babies.
A twenty inch squirm
swaddled by a blanket,
eyes like marbles. All having them.
It seems so. Either that
or they’re getting married.
The biggest day of big days, apparently.
Soon there will be invites. Maybe.
Showing off the calligraphy.
I can picture it,
a suit creased once, a glass of fizz
as a stranger takes photos
to be tucked inside albums
I’ll never take a look at.
Those I’ve known know others now.
They are settling into a life
that writes itself, like a book
never moved from its place
on the shelf. There will be
a triangle of kids kissing
before you ever did,
hands fumbling as if the other person
is a button, noses bumping.
There will be a house
with a dishwasher and pictures
on the walls from the honeymoon
in Greece you didn’t know about
- perhaps don’t care.
Soon you and they will be thirty
and forty and fifty
and their squirm will grow
before you’ve even blinked
or had time to toast the bread.
Some already have.
The hat-trick man is smiling.
I should proffer congratulations,
type out ‘bundle of joy’
at the pencil-esque ultrasound,
the shapes that will become human.
We’re the same age, miles apart.
They’re all at it, it seems.
The girlfriends that is. Having babies.