Were we not once love stood in abbey shadow and sun,
were we not once lovers at the top of bowling alleys
holding, having fun?

As you showered, I
bathed in the oeuvre of your
aura opposite,
thought of
midnight scrambled eggs
     then bed
and the coffee to keep it company.

It’s then we woke
to the Sunday cacophony of avocados on post,
head to the second supplement in
to learn of the best twelve coasts where good lovers go to live,
where good lovers go to hide and give,
where good love exists.

If only the car wasn’t broken:
second hand, forecourt pile of ****.

World traveller.
Suit wearer.
Likes The Shawshank Redemption.

He's off to a singles party
somewhere in Doncaster,
it’s Christmas themed
and fancy dress
though it’s
planned for October the 23rd
during Christmas's only rest.

And I know that in Donny
you find love where you can,
and I know he spent hours
revising his master plan fancy dress idea,
but a raw turkey outfit, coloured
like **** semolina once bought
for a Jamie recipe that didn’t quite work,
won’t cut it on the dance floor.

A rock around her neck
for a star sign birth:
another necklace bought by
another sandal-sock boyfriend.
Time for a new piece
of jewellery, don't you think?
One that’s classy, studded, anything but pink.
It might hang loosely lapping up
the line of air,
that will linger past you when walking to
train station, work station, another day
of painted creation.

Keep the brushes close
and the oils closer,
canvas in the post, ready for closure.
You’re the score and the baton, the lines of manuscript,
my composer.

It was with the sun
that they drove eighteen miles to every quarter of an hour
to the port
where they put down the car and started like petals from every dead flower they saw together.

Up the steps
he tried to steal her waist for his own,
willing his arms to stretch around widths they weren't made for,
only to cement the idea that they weren't alone.

In the cabin they fell asleep to familiar films
and woke up to see the sea out of a round window
and the guarantee they won't hit land nor port
until the captain's say so on the inbuilt radio.

They came back from a grand meal
that was of Titanic proportions, tidy suits and surreal women in waistcoats,
they made love in a bed that wasn't theirs,
and he witnessed it and saw
her new print dress that caught and tore and was reduced to shreds upon the floor.

Movie ticket,
cinema stub,
two halves torn apart
by the fickle fingers of the screen attendant:
he looked up at me with a smile-
one learnt from a handbook compiled by the words of some corporate type,
who dislikes his job, you can tell from his vibe.

“The receipt's in the bag”,
I requested it to be in my hand,
customer service fingers are always painted a day-glow green,
hideous talons of the fake queen,
traced from the princesses of the TV-silver-******-fake-TV screen:
she looked up at me with a smile-
one learnt from a magazine of ink,
nothing more than lies disguised within the wholesome typography imprint.

Carrying nothing but a wallet,
“would you like a bag sir?”
I am carrying nothing but a wallet, of course I would like a bag,
what do you take me for:
she looked up at me with a smile-

Wait.

Her intriguing trapdoor smile concealed
perfectly straight teeth that,
through the gap in her mouth,
spat out the shop floor script,
as if a Shakespearean soliloquy
equipped for the stage,
not this retail trade.

It’s winter
and the radiators make for hot summer bedrooms,
fake heat for a false season,
high humid air in the canopy,
a western, British, Tunisian bazaar.

But outside the window frame into
the rooftop mouth
of chimney teeth and foggy breath,
a pair of speckled starlings,
with deep coffee eyes and rings
of white for plumage decoration,
nest in the wound of this building.

Surely if they migrate,
to warmer climates, past
the Spanish-African gate, they’d
be able to bask in the dawn desert
sun that’ll drift slowly overhead,
raise their young their instead.
I’d like to migrate too,
leave this town for
somewhere new.

carrying Kalashnikovs on their backs,
the rebel mules have panic in their eyes
and resting at the back?
fear filled pupils that dilate
with every corpse seen vacating itself
of tissue and blood,
smell the perfume of gun barrels
and those lonely enough to be culled,
picked off by a trained eye
and a government lie and
a man laid down in an apartment block out of sight up high.

civilian fathers laying spread on the back of a flatbed,
cinderblock walls that offer no protection but that of protecting the dead,
sharpen another knife for another internet viral video of another guy without a head
and finally, cat walk model rebels wearing beaded shrapnel necklaces, gorgeous and chrome red.

and they’ll try give them away around,
a daily sound of the everyday
so they can have a price that they can pay
for the ordinary,
for the sane,
for America’s definition of the lame.

Afternoons that were once body clock mornings turned to early mornings
which became sweet evening bath time odes to rest;
they’re tests we all win at because the prize is quietness,
primary-school-hands-on-heads quietness,
so still it hurts to sleep because
comfort has wrapped every bone in
ill fitting armour making it, once moved,
difficult to find that point of paralysis once again.

Piano-flat black rooms are lit
by dark midnight suns, the bulbs
burning through, the taps in their place,
chairs thrown under tables away from the morning queue
yet to form for the day.

For the Disney print princess
who knows what she's about,
who finds fascinating worlds within dust cover jackets,
who sends smiles in parenthesis; lost love brackets
over classroom mid-drifts,
a bare silence interrupted by pure kindness;
for who walks in noise behind inaudible
commuters from this station to that station
all the way home and back out again on her family vacation,
who can match and pair t-shirts and jeans with
bowler hat crowns from the palace of queens,
who, for all we know, could eat with elbows on tables
and read not prose, but short fiction fables,
who wouldn’t hold doors open or say thank you
to bus men and their drivers,
who might smoke away her pay
with great plumes almost every day,

who might not be the girl I thought she was.

In an arcade
a couple choose an engagement ring,
through a window they peer and grin
for this is the beginning of something new.

He, the larger of the two-
tshirt clad and cool-
stares with nose against the pane.

She, the rounder of the pair-
dressed for work but doesn’t care-
looks to her lover and smiles.

In an arcade
a couple chose their engagement ring,
through the door they came out
for that was the first domino to fall.

I carry on with this coffee
and think to the day when
I’ll be in an arcade choosing a ring.

Trigger finger 13 is hung
from his shoulders,
though not by hooks found in the butchers book,
but with pride and a sweating brow,
one that can survey the terrain with a quizzical eye,
analysing rustling in bushes only 3 clicks away.

Bible tattoos tattooed below the tribal
ones,
and a 13 on the finger used most
when they charge and come.

I did not kiss anybody last night,
yet my body-
from the lips down-
thinks I did.

Clad in a cotton armour,
like a pitch again tent
in a miserable northern monsoon;
the chest is protected from the disappointment,
the ribs are protected from the disappointment,
as for the heart, that’s the one that gets drenched
in drops of distress-
for it is the one ***** that gets played
by the hand of the female chess player;
knowing and knowledgeable, out to get
your king for only profitable stings
and club-night-pictures-check-the-website-for-more-details,
kisses.

I didn’t see the moss at the foot of the white-clad border walls
because I was holding you by the edges,
so to not crease, rip or crinkle you.

The road is always long, but this street
takes the ****. The same trees grow and repeat,
twisting up into great nothings acting as a canopy,
but not quite pulling it off as the rain broke through.

You looked comfortless in my arms, as though you’d
rather be somewhere different in a lot less clothing, and asleep
waking to a familiar ceiling nearer to the weekend than this weekday
in May.

Sometimes, if the wind is right and ushered correctly,
the crane lights of the night highlight that moss
and only those searching will be aware that
it lives at the bottom of a white-clad border wall
just over there.

New faces look through
glass, forlorn features pressed
against the panes figuring
out where this all came from.

Long gone lineage, here in this
hall, is now a pressed image
collected by a flower picker’s hand,
gloved to protect the rust and frozen
within two sheets of glass far taller than
any Yorkshire lass, here somewhere secret.

Old faces gaze at another frame
filled with someone else’s misery,
it’s pinned to another wall next to the
menu for the restaurant down the hall, first left on the second right.

Short queues form under hanging light bulbs,
it’s this month’s exhibition, the Pharaoh’s jewels,
on display all the way from the splayed deserts
of Egypt, but some given by a museum in Manchester
so it looks like there is more than there is.

Ideas are darkened figures,
built upon pigments and ideas.
They can whip through gallery doors,
the canteen,
across mezzanine floors.

Ideas are hotel love affairs,
with their take away trays;
they’ll check up on you
every once in awhile,
with a phone call diverted from
the Hotel Lobby’s, binary file.

Ideas are those ghosts of girls,
pale skinned beauties that’ll pass you
in the street,
only to unfurl at the feet
of some other man
as a fireside treat.

For the girl with the bow in brown hair,

            the heat from the upstairs
restaurant cures the street where we walk,
            the freight’s in on the track,
you can tell by the horns,
            I from the diesel smell below the
afternoon clouds, faint above,
            sometimes when we speak a heart rate
somewhere peaks,
            another graph pinned to an office wall
shows this clear,
            sometimes when we talk tense chests
fear the answer you may say,
            the graph strays past paper and onto
those office walls, in red with a palmed
            smudge where you forgot where
the words ended.

            For the girl with the bow in brown hair,
your eyes are theatre-light reflections in twenty-four hour
window panes sat packed neatly off the corner of West 47th
and 7th, for you’re my central Times Square.

she'll walk off
and you'll walk behind,
you feel like a man
and see everything in soft focus exposure
and her walking ahead, timid and feeling triumphant.
this was your first kiss
and not your last kiss
but your most important kiss;
the foundation kiss,
the scaffold kiss,
cathedral columns holding up the whispering gallery of this kiss.

or did you walk off
and she walked behind,
did she feel like a woman,
soft, warm, and kind seeing everything is a hard focus exposure?
that was her second kiss,
not her last kiss
and not her most important kiss;
it was a mill stone kiss,
a grist lipped ground-down-again kiss,
a motel-hotel-roadside chapel of cheap kisses kiss.

The air-con overhead
drowns out, not enough,
the couple on a date
next to me. His jeans have gathered fluff,
dried in a dryer, crinkled and in-a-rush.
Her shoes are clean though under the table
he doesn’t, and will not, notice,
the closest he’ll come to seeing them is
maybe on a bedroom floor in a month
or maybe two, maybe more if this coffee
date goes askew,
but for time being they gaze, stare
at one another whilst talking:
his plan is to set up an online outreach program,
take the money and run,
hers, to stay in education, an MA
in Creation Research, read and wait,
sit for Judgement Day.

Too many frown lines to be certain
whether or not those lips
are worth a kiss.
Face paint cracks,
middle school onion skin effect,
on pale forehead hide, that
covers bare bone and brain.
Costume falls down at the shoulders,
waist and shin, only to reveal
more paint, Picasso paint,
blue and rose, cubist painted prose.
Your dance is little more than
a jig, left foot to right foot, Newton’s Cradle-
strings attached.

Warmth is a jumper,
a knitted, sewn and cross stitched bunker
in which we exist and sweat in, let out sighs of
I am okay or  I'm always this upset,
and behind those patterns we see the world
through a window the size of a pea, an out-of-focus
key hole where we can watch and wait
and be warm in the thought that
we've no work tomorrow.

Warmth is a blanket on a bed,
a mass produced widespread piece of material
in which we can dive under and have serial sleeps
that carry on into the evening;
and the light coming in through the wide window
hits the Hiroshima shadow-damp on the side wall
making it dance with the commuting-home-traffic.

Before I hide myself away
for another night awake,
I'll look up between letterbox gaps in the broken blind
to see the moon shift six degrees southeasterly and think that
in the next seven hours soft eleven light will leak through as
an alarm-clock-call no one asked for.

Before I walk out the door
for another day of yesterday,
I'll look for the wind coming down the road
to ask it if it's bringing me something new on its coattails.
Ikebana dalliance?
A chance blur with her?
Or something old and the same as before?

The fireside retreats
into the wall
as another TV Christmas special repeats,
with its sound echoing in the hall.

Tangerine,
Satsuma,
Clementine-Orange
peel litters the tabletop;
orange runway for the action figures,
plastic arms, moulded hairs.

Nina Simone plays loud,
'Nobody Knows When You're Down And Out',
Christmas is over,
and now there's nowt to do.

Desert wasteland duvet cover expanse,
light filled from the open curtain above.

Desert wasteland bedroom floor dunes,
filled with clothes from the night before.

Desert wasteland wardrobe cave,
emptied in an attempt to look good.

Desert wasteland kitchen cupboard,
void of food and healthy sustenance.

Desert wasteland cup of tea,
reminding me of home, not of my degree.

Desert wasteland life,
make a to-do list and get on with it.

We left the Summer too long,
that is ran off and absconded,
turned to Autumn,
made blue skies red.

I got told that
there’s a girl for every thought,
by a man with brown eyes.
He took a train South at
nine fifteen with a bought
bag of lies tucked between forearm
and chest; below the neck but still high enough.

Hide behind new names
devised by haircut disasters and
***, gin and past-their-sell-by-date jokes,
thought up in hotel lobbies
in front of a front desk clerk,
oblivious to everything but hotel work.

Fingers fall down on her hook
as we watched the dog die.
A blonde beast with eyes toward the sky,
deep bark eyes that made trees double back and look.
Rows of cosy cut fences lined in front
obscuring dog and death from us,
held breaths hung  as if mist on moors
thus lingering around ‘til horsebacks hunt.
Hooves for hands fumble, tremble,
lead to the inner assembly of
organs, functions and that hidden temple-
shaped teardrop like, rains nothing quite
like the weather above.

we met in Mexico,
slept rough in the back;
the seats folded down levelled out
and tacked down with two springs

we went by cities
not knowing their names;
stopped at payphone kiosks
shamed our pasts with left messages on answering machines

we stopped at toll booths,
paid for more road to play on,
to drive over smooth,
to cross another border before the noon

we deciphered restaurant menus,
ate with fingers crossed and hoped
the chicken was just that,
left a tip lost in another used ash tray

we wore sun cream
to screen us against the rays
and the glare reflecting
off the mineral water, natural bays

we walked up to bars
asked for drinks in cold bottles,
sipped and supped until kisses rolled out,
left holding hands like mannequin models

we kept the trip a secret,
kept it secure between you and me
and the folds in the bed sheets,
we only exist in hotel cheap suites.

Decorations are up
hung from fishing wire,
fishing for good luck.

There’s Christmas on her neck
and as she stretches out in front of me
a wake of cinnamon decks the halls.

It remains and lingers,
falls away past nostrils and
turns to festive well-wishes.

The market is in full swing
wrapped up tight in large scarves,
like a low cut sling cradling the cold.

Winter has the streets in its hold,
the wind is sour, bitter to taste,
and punters, commuters, Asian lost-tourists walk in haste.

Shop floors are warmed by radiators
hung above their wide open doors:
let the heat out, let the customers in.

And when the mid-November light dims
and the council gets past the
everlasting electrical admin,

streetlamp sticks will light and spark,
sending effulgent embers down onto
the Cambridge cobbles.

Children will peer wide eyed into windows
remembering names for their lists,
hoping to unwrap them as gifts later on down the line.

Adults, some probable parents and others newly-wed together,
enjoy the festivities, the weather, the bespoke crafts
bought from Argos sold as Handmade Swedish Chairs

And do they care? No.
It’s Christmas in Cambridge and
winter is settling in.

Shift work nurse, where do you go?
Is it to another ward, to another wound,
that is in need of stitches to be sewn?

Potbellied tarmac man, where do you go?
You’ve left the stove frothing at the lid,
can your couple of quid not wait for lunch?

Gym, mother-of-one, where do you go?
Your son is sat still with a coffee,
whilst you’ve gone to buy another toffee, poppy seed, frothy beverage- surely that’s not fair, is it?

Big-Issue-seller-of-the-precinct, where do you go?
Your Yorkshire Terrier, alone in the South,
is terrified from the traffic, moist at the mouth.

Market stall second-hand book woman, where do you go?
Lines of used literature are waiting to be read,
why have you left them to help your hash-head son on his second come-down of the day?

Shift work nurse and potbellied tarmac man,
big issue seller and gym mother-of-one,
market stall second-hand book woman,
where do you all go?

Half cut teens dressed in high street dreams
stand and survey the beach,
combing it for male shells, to clarify:
guys who think crucifix tattoos on their lower leg will save them from hell.

A mother whose job it is to look after surfboard and parasol,
yes you the mother looking my way,
you should ditch the marriage and get on the road,
hug the coast with tire squeals,
hug men with body sacrificing screams in
cheap French roadside hotels that don’t clean their bathrooms that well.

Girlfriend left to sit the sun out whilst boyfriend joins husbands in the surf,
reads but really she’s breathing,
passing the hours and folding over page corners,
don’t let him see that you don’t love him.

Tablet kids who watch the sea on screen, in apps,
when behind them is a torrent of live data swells and boils
causing swimmers to tumble and coil up close to the sea bed,
some parents, increasingly the same,
forgetting why they came to the coast in the first place.

9/11 happened,
so I turned to friend
and shook.
Year 5 boys won't understand
the chaos of planes and buildings,
together in a perpetual meld
of iron, and fuselage weld.
Help note snow turned September to December,
within a million pens to paper.

People fell.
Hearts sunk.
Raised hell
in New York's cold front.
Bowery, Bleeker, Church & Liberty
all shook to one man's thought:
dreary and undefended, destroyed in the heart.

all faith was lost in a caravan car park with seats reclined,
a family of four, small and contorted, wrapped
around a car for an uncomfortable night of no sleep,
and for the soundtrack:
                                                propeller blades of the port and a grown man weeping.

now we understand and gather and know and grasp the concept of loss,
now it's a:
                                                brother to a younger sister
                                                and now a lost son to forever mother
                                                and a lonely child to a missed father,
                                                insurance-won't-be-done-on-time
                                                because the route-master turned up late.

now loss can never be found so it stays stuck in memory,
now memory is:
                                              reverse the car into the garage and don't stop for the wall,
                                              or bend over double and crawl into the back of a van
                                              duck down because you're tall for your age.

so now you're no longer and when this is realised
i will write this up into a stage play for you
to hide and conceal and disguise the face that will undoubtedly bloom in tears.

*Earlier my eyes wandered looking for someone through a window watching the main street in the rain. It's been a year and still you've missed the refrain, we'll try again on the chorus perhaps next year sometime.

London subway
metro train station connection,
busy off-peak City rush,
escalator packed, another northern crush.
Ticket barrier blockade,
pass through tomorrow not today.
Police at the exits,
a black sea of law abiding abyss,
protectors of the peace.
Another announcement over the crowd,
“Platform 2 is closed for the storm cloud to be cleared”.

Body parts have spread
over carriage doors,
torn from their sockets,
slipping pictures from necklace lockets.

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.

A summer’s hand on bewildered torso chest,
her love: the best kept secret since their escape
to Brest that time in Spring,
Northwest France with its untamed waves lapping at the
hull of The Sea King in the harbour, half mast.

But with every try, harder than the last,
he did not respond to her see-through glass
appeals for an apology-
over two-hundred-and-seventy-minutes
wasted on the TGV back to Paris,
a holiday cut short by her wandering knees,
wide apart in another man’s apartment.

For money was passed in sweating palms
for a day’s encounter with her good looks and charms,
though the men never knew
about her man back at home,
designing the new tourist information
for a cheap weekend-stay in the heart of Rome.

What he bought to the marriage:
stability, safety, security and their baby.

What she bought to the marriage
mainly tears and daily anxiety.

But they both knew the complications
and the clauses of her contract,
agencies would delve deep into the contact’s history
to make sure they were legit,
but it never hid the fact that she had
intimate encounters in hotel honeymoon, champagne, new linen suites.

I'm going home,
leaving the pack unknown and unsafe
and my eyes strafe, swoon and sigh at the holy display
of the pure 9-to-5,
walking away from her place of pay,  
to go home like me tonight.

A swift above carries on home,
food for its young carried between teeth and tongue.
A family walk from the local school,
with song being sung from the cooler two of the sons.
A car reverses nearly knocking and smudging the woman in blue;
a jacket atop a blouse, pristine shop-bought-new.

I remember her sunglasses.
I remember her eyes from behind her sunglasses.
I remember her staring me down through the lenses
melancholy and blue,
knowing that this was a passing
break-through affair.

Your tilted head
shifted your waterfall hair
to the left.

In a stream of beguiling blonde
ripples,
your chest was met with a dry splash of gold,
real gold.

Technology at your fingertips,
HTML scripts morphing
into long sentences, bouncing in grammar and not stopping
until you take another breath, another
sip from your coffee cup of bitter death- one sugar, no less.

Daunt Books bag beside your chair’s side,
the faithful mute mule carrying
your words and notes and probably an umbrella too,
it’s raining outside and I wish for you not to get wet.

Jumps back on the ketamine and the *******
and stands in alleyways and lanes
and forgets why the stars sit and the moon stands;
who fights demons with hairdryers and backward hats.

And it’s okay to look like your Dad you never knew,
in glances through the wood would only a few see the resemblance,
but similar hair won’t make up for lost Christmases
and days away at rain safari parks.

You’ll have to leave the fox hole through the brambles
at some point in the future,
so get scratched now and bleed a little sigh
of relief,
one that you’ve broken the tie and loosened the knot
and show us all that you’re out of your cot.

‘I was too young when I fell for God’, she said
‘I heard you’, I said, ‘I said I could hear you’.

The train was busy, far louder than usual,
and we sat together, fingers wound together. Rough cuticles.

What were we doing so young,
getting married before the eyes of our Son?

Twenty-two and not a thought for the future,
though maybe you’ll be slimmer and I’ll be cuter.

‘I know about you two and your motorbike miles’ I said,
her face turned around, tired. It was Dulux paint-chart red.

‘How did you? Did he? I am sorry’ she said,
‘Oh that’s okay, really it’s fine, not to worry'.

Tube train doors opened and I filed out in no line,
she followed behind, slow. Karma had taken her spine.

‘You could wait to hear my explanation’ she said, tired.
Across the tiled platform floor, I carried on uninspired.

‘It was a stupid weekend away, we took the scenic route. Are we okay?’
Full stop pupils and an open mouth comma, what else could she possibly say?

‘It’s only recent, not all that frequent’ she said,
‘Well who knew that Winter was the season of unfair treatment?’ I yelled.

Reached the escalators and walked out single into the fresh air,
turned left onto the street and went looking for the nearest bar.

I see timber, I see my Dad.*
The wrinkled grain grin
sits lost on his face,
he’s selling his timeless record collection:
the finest midlife crisis since records began.

Lined bits of paper with a pen and plan,
bass players and guitarists are all being sold,
including the front man,
microphone, monitor and stand.

Under the slim light, what’s
going to be sold is exposed
ready for a thorough cleaning
of the black gold moulds.

None of us are allowed near, we have been told,
this is a strict operation and it’s under control,
he starts spouting tiny liner note quotes
none of us understand, we need a translator- grab your coats.

We returned to a mess of a man:
he did not go through with his midlife crisis plan.
His extra 3000 children in their sleeves
can sleep safe tonight knowing that everything will be all right.

She said she liked her coffee cold and dark
like the seas separating her bed and Denmark:

harsh and bitter and brown in the largest
cup we own, so when drinking it
your nose would drown
into an abyss of cheap-coffee-granule-
buy-one-get-one-free ****;

and delivered with it upon the stolen tray,
taken from that shop's Kitchen Must Haves display,
was a plate with two triangles of lightly toasted
toast laid out like the ankles of my late Grandma
(but we weren't together then so, to you,
it just looked like some toast arranged nicely on a plate for us two);

also on the stolen tray from that shop's Kitchen Must Haves display,
was a lovely array of cut of up fruit arranged liked
canapés at every cheap-wedding-buffet:
grapes cut into unfathomable shapes
and slices of kiwi our fingers could never negotiate
and avocado which was there just to cure invisible
weight gain and bad morning breath,
but that's what Google told me so
I can't take it as a guarantee;

and in all of this I was apparently making a fool of myself
because serving you a delicious breakfast
to the sound of Frank Sinatra's Moon River
is not what we discussed, ever- even last night or last week,
in fact, we never talked about this horrendously
unique breakfast.

Happy Anniversary.

I’m the son of my Mum,
product of Dad-
just with his mid seventies look instead.

Sown and grown in a house
from the past,
fixed by the full swing of
the can-do and will do,
not by the we’ll get through
or the *******.

****** by the plum tree
because its root system
sat lower than the toilet seat,
in the downstairs bathroom,
working radiator- never any heat.

Tantrums on the second step
because bad-mannered children
never want what they get.
But in hindsight, and I’ll admit,
they were doing it good, doing it right,
doing it by the book
printed in black and white.  

Nothing but rocks and stories where I’m from:
pebbles in the path
between the herb garden grass;
box hedge borders that’ll protect
and last;
stone walls hiding cancers and dangers,
unwanted gifts from door-to-door strangers;
postmen in shorts
with their all-weather legs;
women up the road
with their cool-box eggs;
neighbours behind curtains
hiding help not guns;
children in the street,
they’re somebody’s loved ones.

I’m the son of my Mum,
product of Dad-
just this time round
tall, grateful and glad.