Today and Yesterday and Tomorrow

A boy wakes me in the night, afraid of monsters.

His breathing rattle rattles.

I lay down in the bed beside him

And point out the night-shapes

Of towels and blankets and other boys.

The window panes press in on us

But his lungs are louder. The cabinet

Stops us seeing each other’s faces:

I lift my arm so he can tell I’m still alive.

He coughs and struggles, perhaps asleep,

Perhaps not. I think of dialling 999

But something of the darkness stops me.

In the morning, the boy tells me goodbye.

A man I nearly know dies in transit. I strip

100 sheets from 100 beds, thinking of nothing.

Bumblebee

I saw my first bumblebee of the season today, by the canal in Reading. It looked pretty sleepy. I had forgotten how beautiful they are. Perhaps by autumn I will have forgotten the beauty of conkers?

I don't want to go to stupid cambridge.

I have a place this september. I'm being so ungrateful about it.

I'm tired of fresh starts. I've had eight jobs and lived in six places in the past year. I don't want to move, and make new friends, and buy more blu-tack for the stuff I stick on my walls. And I don't want to have to file things.

Mulch

Today on the way to Longleat (sp?) I saw some mulch for sale. Me and Vicky once spent much of our free time sitting by the pool and saying 'mulch'. We'd create silences just so we could break them with 'mulch'. We'd lie in bed and not go to sleep, just to say 'mulch'. It was the funniest thing, the word mulch, that summer. We'd laugh every time we said it. It was how we said it, perhaps, and the pointlessness of both the word and mulch itself.