Looking down at my fleshly toes,
I creak to the loo at 4 in the morning,
a listing dreadnaught,
careening into doorframes.
Flick of the cold light puts first signs of age
in stark relief,
and I transfix on swollen pink
round the callouses
I’ve gathered like memories.
There was once a boy who
drove these long-neglected feet
over wild fields of autumn,
revelling in the sensation
of sharp, dry leaves,
that crackling sound of victory,
young projectile body,
tumbling down slopes,
a mad-capped wind at my heels.
Do I still want to climb mountains,
like that one over behind my house,
with its antenna
erect and ridiculous and
contemptuous under the sky?
I dream of that hill,
and the things I might find up there,
a place above the heaviness
of concrete,
the weight of noise.
Up there, I know,
on nights thick with summer
treacle,
young bodies still writhe and love
in the grass under the stars.
Up there,
musical bodies go off like
firecrackers.
