A blue morning on the 46a to Stillorgan.
I get emotional gliding past the little orange town house. I've passed it every day for two years but this time it feels different.

I can smell your walls and furniture.
Can taste the breakfast you'd surprise me with after a long night of dancing and love making.
Can feel your head on my shoulder as you hold me at the kitchen counter.

You kiss my stomach.

On our last morning, you had driven me to college. Me, eating nutella and banana toast and you watching the roads too carefully. You had just gotten your license. Fionn Regan played softly.

Four hundred of us pour out
from the lights turned on,
girls in bare feet in the rain and the wind
to see Christmas lights on Grafton street.

Trinity’s beautiful, but not where the heart is,
the grass is muddy on college green
a cold breeze is whipping off the Liffey,
and everyone’s singing, low lie the fields.

The guards are milling, we’re trudging,
some holding hands or kissing –
bring me back to Stillorgan for ten euro?
*******! No come on sir, I’m freezing.

It’s grey, it’s wet and it’s cloudy.
I want Burdock’s or some dodgy chippy,
I want to hear the song of a boy from Ballymun
and live forever young in Dublin’s fair city.