Back home

We sang Auld Lang Syne
You smiled, and drank her poison
I never left you

Home again

Life has moved down South
though birthplace still owns my soul.
May one ever leave?

Home

Mean and tawdry town
shorn of money and purpose; 
always in my blood

A thread

I could die today.
I’ve thought that many times
since I was a troubled person
in my teenage years –
before the suicide attempt –
but less and less once I took my life
in hand,
to simplify and move it forward…

So it was a shock to realise in A&E
that it was your life that’s hanging
by a thread more slender than my own.

Don’t go.  Not yet.  Not yet a while….

Whimsy

I wore my shorts this one more time
in angsty hope, in optimism
that showing willing by my token
I might persuade the summer it should linger
one more day, even perhaps another hour
or two, before it flits away…

But it was over yesterday.