When I was new & full of days
and my birth was in darkness
I crawled through heaven’s bandwidth
to the sky’s thorny outage
placing my cross in the hull
of a timeblind star :




I steered
and cauterised my overspend
on toys, walking where the graves
were greener, into a headwind
of ‘No Shit Shylock.’ A globe
rolled over the shyster sand
and the bitten was generous.
would you take the cup off your ear?




I entered corrupt arcades :
sand forts glistered in a cosmos.
I thought it was Florida—
it was Albion forever.
I lay in bed when I cusped
and was hacked by the sun nine times—
a jellyfish veined with lumens.
I never poked that stingray.
There was a time my life was trimmed
like the marble rind on a clock
and I watched a moth the size
of a beefsteak climb the glass—
we locked prehensile eyes : it,
with its face like Mozart. That was
the year the meteor landed at
my son’s feet, magnetised by fate.
He said, ‘it’s called SAND because
it is between sea & land.’




They said the sea was a mother
but to me it was a kitten
that had since lost its mother.
I could hear the inside of snails
and sometimes see with the lens
of a kestrel.




                Living for this :
The hour when my lungs outspanned
like a jackdaw. God’s spirit
was the same as my spirit
so I said twenty-one prayers
and wrote each day, knowing that
Christ was the same as Bacchus.
I believed in a reverse
Paganism in which objects
manifested as Gods. Spirited!
I was played by the weather
like a moodboard & could see
blue in storms & red in snow.
Alcohol made my teenage
anxiety subside; when I
was forty I cut back drink
to reduce my anxiety.
My son became a found poem.
The alphabet lived in the clouds.
leo-licked & August tanned—
I roared each Summer inside the sun.

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