By the beak

If you recollect correctly: You’ll see I read a poem I’d written years ago, before I met you. And not just because it came to me, but

because I thought you should know what you were getting into, even if you didn’t know you were getting into anything. It seemed to fit.

It’s observations about clouds were like the day behind us, when we’d spoken about skinny dipping in the reservoir but instead got lost, repeatedly.

It was a good poem. It was old. From a time when I wrote poetry, not just statements. From before. I like to think I read it well.

And, anyway, it worked. Then we talked about the things we had achieved, the things we wanted still. Like  getting married after getting off this hill.

You will be in the background

of a newsfeed, or on the table next to me, between buses along city Road or hiding from the rain in the Oxfam on upper Street. Or perhaps when it comes to pass it will be me, I will be be the one you see in the headlights of your minicab, or shifting aimlessly between the office and the last sun in Bloomsbury.

Her thumbs came up a sticky brown: red around the edges, with bits of wings and legs, mid-grip, falling off.

She made some noise of disgusted revelry, a smile arching beneath her nose.

It's too hot today to write you a poem My literal hands smudge the screen; The tube is airless and there's no sun, Which is basically a lie because how can one place so dark be so hot?

But it's your birthday. And it's a strange thing, getting older, with fewer poems, less exchanged. The miles between. The songs that take you back and forth and back again to vague traces,   misspelled.

Fuck you, Wrexham, I never loved you. I never needed your smoky bars, I didn't want your siriad caffs.

And fuck you and your blinking streetlights Your, beautiful, helicon streetlights beckoning to Minera and beyond. Fuck You.

Fuck you, Wrexham, I'm not seventeen. I'm not q-ing at both doors of clubs I hate for music I can't stand. I'm not getting pizza and walking home. Fuck You.

And fuck you, Wrexham, she's fucking left. She's inside dry and I'm out here wet - she's fast asleep and I'm wide awake.

Casting onto the front lawn the long shadows of a summer evening. My wrist guides the rod just the wrong side of ten and pulls it back, with pain-staking ease, time and again to two, or there-a-bouts.

With apologies to Hannah

On Saturday, you came without my slippers or breakfast and burrowed on my keks, looking up my nose. “When we first met” faded into Federer wins in straight sets and Sparky’s face smothered yours.

I protested with a League Two placard switched to Bell’s Scottish League and marked Right to Silence with a cross at three-thirty.

Bristles twitch as he snores, spent from all that carving and cracker-pulling big chest loaded with man breasts, rising and falling.

For RA

It’s his voice, they said. Really brings it to life, really get the caesura there, when he reads it, they said. You know what I mean? they said. Yeah, I know. I said.

Put in print you must be nothing. The brace of vowels finding assonance and the sibilance of your guttural northern wit must just be music’s happy accident.

We can now take a photo of the backs of your eyes

from this we hope to see your dreams in situ.  You worried us. So we have begun  to follow your keystrokes home, including the poem left at your front door.

We know all about the poems inside. We have intercepted your internet to the point  we rewrite your searches as you type:  It’s because we love you. You are our lense.

Just last night our agents dreamt, too, and as we tailed you from the tube  you turned, our eyes went beyond the space of regulation four passersby, or eight feet.