One day our spines’ll tesselate under sage soft duvets as storms sweep across us and no one will cry;
not one noise shall slip from tongues
‘cos strength comes from keeping quiet
or carrying on.

You’re a now realised kindness that doesn’t know what breath is
or how the north circular works in festive rush hours home,
but I’ll kiss the answers upon your tender carbon tapered chest and hope the toner never runs low
(your dad would’ve handcrafted every thing he knew in semaphore if he’d have pulled through,
but you’ll learn in time, too, that time does not ruin fewer experiences than being).

I lean in. Whisper this (above) across your one body,
three eighths the size of a coffee table hardback book:
the result of patience pined for
that I mimed along to motherhood the best I could for nine months
and now, here, I lift the hood and work out what to do next       in this rush to settle down and sit,
sip until you snooze off into silence.
Here I carry you and do not notice the weight,
stare at the gape of you, my newly framed little one held in the palm of my hand,
squat full four pinter named after someone we knew.
You landed lunar surface side up,
smoothed new to the toes
and I wonder how I’ll meet you
I wonder how this goes.

Take your ******* fedora off you are not a Jones.
Kid, leave the captain's hat on, gods know you're going it need now,
those waves are knee dip and those rip-tides drag:
lay flat across the hull in dreams of concrete and something a little more stable
until someone takes over,
guides you back home to the lit terraces,
glowing apartment advent calendar,
lighthouses of cushions
and the sofa just how you left it.

Within simple pleasures sleep intricate tasks,
curled up dogs at the foot of fires:
someone please tell them their Dalmatian died whilst they were on holiday,
he was
below
the radiator in the spare playground.
Am I a weak man? it asked the black marble glare of the corner skirting board joint.
Am I meant to feel like that gasp after a slow kiss? that come back for more
               Godfather Part Two again,
               Lord of the Rings: Return of the King,
               rumble string of motorcycle parade through tarmac and your core
               sat crossed legged on any first school floor.
AM morning calls to vets,
stumble for words and
over the abbreviations,
the IAADP have got your back in case Gandalf ever witnesses your blinding,
forever led forth by a lead and little more faith in something worth confessing over.

Love is a tango
it's too hot to handle,
someone sang in a spontaneous smoking area
spawned from a spare terracotta *** and someone asking for help once,
so nervous their knees quaked,
slow down reigns not effective once their BPM was past 200 whatever
Jeremy Clarkson was screaming that week,
but their eyes,
they were knocking down walls with toffee hammers,
scattering chunks under werthy wooden horses,
rubbing sweet stud wall shards into coarse prison gravel with waiting soles,
whistling so not to give the game away.
Escape now back to a Lowell of an old park bench,
dig through **** and pipelines of earth for
canons of authors stacked high in front of you,
you awfully well bled individual,
the wounds from those words about to heal
all the slips you fell into
dragged yourself out of,
clawed back your fedora through more doorways than you can
remember: it always gets you into trouble.
Kid, one thing at once.

Somebody put Kylie Minogue on
from the wall mounted touchscreen one-pound-a-go jukebox-
Coldplay would've been better, but I should be so lucky-
and the rising water in the Titanic's engine room of noise
rose to a First Class stateroom chatter and Kate Winslet
and the queue to the bar grew a little longer

and then
you
walked
in
like
a
Sunday
morning
walk,

one long stroll by a river edge or lake side,
through a Westfield, Bluewater Meadowhall
in one long rehearsed map move entrance
dodging standing drinkers and their plus ones in Zara trench coats and Boden shawls,
and you left a wake of wet forest and crumbling beachhead afternoons behind you as you
walked
on
through
the
crowd
to the pool table at the back where you watched
*** after ***
after pint
after ***
after we need more one pound coins to play more pool,
and you went out for **** though you don't smoke yourself
and you looked up into the mist because you're the kind that would find New York Stuart Little big:
mostly building, building, building, window, balcony, bridge, statue and Central Park trees,
and you walked back in with river eyes, your lids moving from cold back to behind-the-fridge, pub-room warm
and they watered a little, Pacific blue sliding over eternal black;
I think she's the kind that needs a lion tamer not an orchestra leader,
but I've only got Petit Filous muscles and I had four raw eggs this morning and I'm still not as strong as I’d like to be,
(put the baton down, Tim)
a River Phoenix younger Harrison Ford stasis, one train wreck ride to remember,
nowhere near the lion tamer you need.

Kylie sings for the fifteenth time in a row,
and the bar is past last orders though cash is pushed under for pints
and you disappeared under bar light
and then into the moonlight
and now I'm sat grieving
the Golden Retriever of The Nutshell
in Bury St Edmunds this evening.

we stared at it for a good five minutes,
children around a rope swing body too afraid of the drop, so he jumped.
One of us poked at it, jabbed it 'til its petals fell off:
thrown flowers from the overpass above,
lightly dropped, not a touchdown distance here,
well,
whoever misplaced them was distant, over horizon line, past Joey joke,
they were stumbling upon well written blurbs of people
rendering all reading pointless, we're all the same, these flowers don't matter,
or they'd seen their other tired and said
please hide your luggage, dear, it's slowing us down
then stormed out and off, flowers in tow, Elizabeth's got her Way, let's leave everything here.

For this show of all things cute and affordable from Clintons
was an IMAX, Nolan Cameron's *** crack screen-shot of despair,
another pop at the small guy
kick him whilst he's up,
don't let that year 2000 pip of pulp sitting hammock in his stomach fool you,
that's perfectly normal,
carry on,
a meal for one in a **** themed restaurant,
this evening's more pointless than a mortgage on a salami,
sharpie on whale skin, what's the point in that,
probably something.

We weren't a we, but we should've been,
that would've been fun, something to talk about later on.

My tummy stood still; a statue of a stomach that paused as she passed by
to get into the used bookshop line to pay for her basket of titles and authors I'd
no idea existed, but I'd be willing to learn and read and not breathe until I had
enlisted the use of Wikipedia to find out a one fact about each of them so to break the ice
and breach that border of conversation, because I'd want to tell her in some Woody Allen
way that her eyes were nice and that Cambridge could be ours tonight if she wanted to.

This body is a poor man's idea of grandeur-
and Talk To Frank says that confidence doesn't come in tubes,
pills nor injections, but when tomorrow morning you
feel like **** with a stomach-pit of methylamphetamine
and a head craving caffeine,
you'll disagree and say to him,

*Look, I talked to a girl I wouldn't normally talk to and we kissed.