You run with your shoulders
higher than your ears. Your neck
points your eyes at that beautiful colour
and that beautiful colour and that beautiful colour.
Your feet are hooves, ice skates, a slow winter.
Your fingers point at the four corners
with intent, the crowd want you there.
Your skin is a singlet; pink and green Lycra
ricocheting off walls you forget you can see
desperate to move forward, desperate
to get thicker.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

It’s getting dark and I look at the jam jar
of cashew nuts in my flat roasting
on your hob after school. You teach me
how to eat pomegranates with toothpicks.
You ask my Mum if you can have egg
and chips with us and we see how far
the inside of a football can inflate
with a foot pump; my Dad isn’t the one
who works in health and safety.
We draw chalk tennis courts on the road.
We cannot bounce on a pogo stick.
The bus driver falls over again
while we record a radio show sat
on your bed. I feel polyps falling off
my skin like stardust.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

All of their mouths are smiling:
the lion, the giraffe, the monkey, the zebra.
Their wooden bodies are painted
in primary colours not matching their faces
stood upright in a hand-shaped boat.
They’re not in the correct places.
They don’t say anything to each other,
they just allow themselves to be taken
and put back and taken and put back
while the hand learns patience.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

Our faces are plasticine
stuck to the top of a desk;
fingerprints for cheekbones,
amateur artist impressions
of hair and open mouths.
We look over ourselves,
melting into dust and photographs
for a box in a loft of a future house
owned by a cut and shut of our skulls.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

The pedal bin creaks
like it’s had no one
to talk to all day;
its dry throat coughs
on tissue and banana
skin. What’s the plan?
it tries. How’ve you been?

© Carl Burkitt 2021

Flames from the past
crackle on the screen
to make you feel at home.
There is no way it warms you up,
but it does. The orange waves
tap into the part of you
that still wants to live in a cave
and talk about wild berries
and meat on the bone.
The logs died God knows when
but I get to watch it over and over
and imagine you holding
a marshmallow over them, cracking
that smile I tell everyone about
when I’ve had a couple of beers.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

The words land like piss
on a blue urinal cake.
The man’s smile
is bathroom tile violence.
The need to fight melts away
when your bones have reached
full capacity and my skin slips into
corridor silence. He has nowhere
to put the urge to damage
so uses a finger on the hand
that isn’t directing his stream
to point at a blue bobble
that was a gift in June.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

The phone box was full.
There must have been anywhere
between 600 and 80,000 bodies
crammed together in there.
Limbs wrapped around each other like
a landline cable around a nervous finger.
Everyone had someone to call
but nothing to say.
That didn’t stop them fighting
for the chance to stand
in a comfortable silence.

© Carl Burkitt 2021