Whenever I close my eyes

I watched you run from the sauna to the December sea -

I felt dizzy with love watching you -

I wanted to shout out you are lovely -

I had to be silent, pretending not to be looking at you -

I remembered how I'd felt your heart on mine -

I'd said you had bought light into my life -

You were a bright star in a dark sky - 

Whenever I close my eyes, I see you -

Beautiful and brave, running across the sand -

December 2025

East Stoke, Ferring 

Reading Murakami

The border is closer now - 

This book I'm reading is my passport - 

I will walk through these birch trees -

I will lose my shadow - 

I will read dreams -

I will find a darkness deeper and softer than anything I know - 

December 2025

I should have asked all of them for their names

The Kurdish barbers gave me coffee -

It was on the house -

No, no -

They waved my note away -

The young man with the darting scissors told me he was born in Syria - 

He cut my hair with swaggering artistry -

There was a boy from Iran in a leopard print fleece -

There were gleaming beards and laughter -

We have no country one of them said - 

I remembered the scornful words I'd heard in the Turkish village -

There - that is where the Kurds live -

The small house beyond the tea garden -

The stony soil -

I should have asked him for his name, the young man cutting my hair -

I cannot go back he said -

I listened to the music coming from the speakers -

I sipped the sweet coffee -

I should have asked all of them for their names -

I should have told them mine - 

I can hear your heart

I drove through the forest, thinking of you -

There were dark trees -

It was New Year's Eve -

I remembered you snatching my diary, tearing it away from my grasp -

What's in here you asked, laughing, clasping my wrists together - 

What have you written ? 

Later, in the boat park, you held me in your arms -

I was breathless, barely able to speak -

My lips were bruised from kissing -

Sometimes we would drive at night - 

You would stop the car and hold my hand -

You would say I can hear your heart -

December 2025

Your fallen boy

Seeing you in the library - 

Asking you out, not expecting you to say yes - 

The joyful surprise of those moments still with me -

Both of us laughing - 

Yes you said yes - 

I remember the dark weight of your hair -

How we held each other close -

You could have carried me in your arms -

Lifted me up as though I were made of air - 

On our first date, I took you to Winchester -

I wore my chalk stripe suit -

You wore a green dress and your silky skin - 

It was summer -

We walked down the long nave of the cathedral -

I showed you Jane Austen's tomb -

We drank Fleurie in a pub with latticed windows -

Driving back,  we stopped the car on the shore road -

There was a pale moon -

You unfastened your dress -

You held my head, sighing, stroking my hair -

You once sent me a postcard you'd bought in The Tate -

The Lament of Icarus -

Three nymphs lamenting over the beautiful dead boy -

I thought of you you wrote -

I would visit you in Brighton -

Come up and see me and make me smile playing on every jukebox -

Losing myself in your sighs -

Your fallen boy, carrying sorrow in his wings -

December 2025

Windfalls haiku

Windfalls on the grass - 

A memory of summer -

Sunlight on my tongue -

Glimpsed in a mirror

Names of places on an old map -

Glimpsing my younger self in a mirror - 

Gargrave, Coniston Cold -

Driving to Malham with Richard -

Shamefully, I wrote nothing -

Piecing this together from shards of memory -

The faded names - 

The half dreams - 

*

Crammed into Richard's Japanese car - 

Like innocent cosmonauts - 

Myself driving, always in the fast lane, crazy -

Not thinking for one moment about it -

*

The narrow road over the moor - 

The tall thistles in the field -

Rain falling on the roof -

Curling smoke from slim cigarettes -

The American girl from Tallahassee -

Meeting her after a shameful night -

She called me pilgrim -

Invited me after I retold a beautiful story -

Sitting cross legged on the warm grass -

A circle of boys and one girl - 

*

Now, near the high cliffs -

The lonely farms, the dark tarn 

Scrambling upwards - 

A cold wind under a northern sky - 

Ancient faces in the rocks -

Clouds - 

Far below, our cold beds -

Gareth's fiver crumpled up with a few coins -

*

Walking under the moon to The Buck Inn -

Theakstons with flint eyed farmers -

One night, fortunes told in a low ceilinged parlour -

A smoky fire, candlelight -

Geoff, refusing to open his palm -

Never saying why -

*

I thought they were young gods -

Far above me -

Nick, talking about taking rally corners in his Mini -

Gareth, with his louche drawl, his kerchief -

They knew the ways of girls -

They were cool -

Yet they were boys -

Just like me, pieces of a story -

Now gone entirely - 

Or glimpsed, sometimes, by chance, in a mirror -