The stoicism of my teenage years
has tapered in and become
Two sharp bright prongs (and I, at 21,
feel age as a knapsack stuffed with brick):
One as sometimes round a bend
and magic hour's low sun rebounds
from Georgian façades, scatters to entwine
in Spring's unbudded branches;
The other as in rolling stock or moving fast
(low lying clouds like God’s censor pen
half erase the identikit suburb proliferation)
And the allotments up to the railway tracks
are rough dirt scattered with white plastic sack.

So I bury my head in a book, scan not its pages,
and ponder the entanglement of particles,
and my love in Hanley, am I, perhaps,
the perfect cryptography?

I have plateaued in my thirty-ninth year -
the profusion of overlapping images,
The accumulation of god’s hidden things.
My love pricks her thumb
and I am still here, alone, but a little bleeded.
My old stomping grounds are abandoned now, resting, silent
(pill boxes, iron gates, fortifications, fragile, oxidised),
are nesting sites for protected birds, the stone used still,
in new buildings.
And I am still my old confusions but sometimes
mundane with rage and I am Ganymede as ever.

I lay my body down to sleep on thorns,
I sweat as the filthy woman menstruating.
I am forever unclean.
Scorpio three times.