There’s a football player printed
four times the size of him telling me to buy a razor.
The pixels of his skin look like a patch of leather
we used to kick around in the garden. Once,
we took the flesh of a ball off and pumped
the sad sack inside as far as it could go.
Watch your eyes in case it pops, my dad said.
We looked the other way and kept pumping.
The thing bag grew to half of me
and we punted into a tree. We couldn’t
reach it, so grabbed a rake and watched it pop
until our eyes blinked us to today.

© Carl Burkitt 2022