The days were huge and kind
and sometimes after school

we’d buy a bag of broken biscuits
for the long walk home

across the heavy heat of afternoon
on lucky days she wouldn’t take

the pennies offered up in supplication

I swear I felt the swirly patterned paper
rip from the walls of my childhood bedroom.
It was the same stained cream shade as my skin –
pockmarked, cut and scabbed, dry and peeling…..

Shadowed boats bereft of sail
absorb the surge and slap
constrained by a blue-grey chink
of mooring chains.

A bird skirts across the fence
& I rush to the window
to behold its flapping wings—
It’s been ages
since I last saw a bird.

I can already hear the chorus of my tribe.
They want the ancient blade,

the guillotine that hovered
above my head like a halo of death.

when you
know that your time with someone has almost run out, that is what you do. you look for
tiny things buried in the sand so that you do not have to look at the huge broken thing
standing between you both.

and if we walk to the same sea later
we’ll see something heaving up beside us:
caskets of grey, white-capped, barren and loose,
the way memories are.

so you collect those poems which reveal
life at its most intense and solitary
turning them on when you most need to feel

      St Ann’s Square Manchester, 23rd May 2017 Because I cannot show you what is at the centre of all this I will lay language up to its edge, walk its edges the way I moved through the back of the crowd too afraid to go in. I had to shade my eyes from...