Most popular moisturisers
make my beard flaky.
At 6 foot 4,
when I try to fit in my white bath,
I look like a rejected angel
crash landed after being pushed.
Vitiligo melts me in the sun.
No amount of bicep curls
make my twig arms thicker.
But I like the smell of roasted carrots
on a Sunday
and the wide eyes of a snowball
desperate to grow.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

I’d like him to enjoy anything
as much as I like a Pringle in my mouth.
I’d like him to know where his food comes from.
I’d like him to have a relationship with outside
and a relationship with inside.
I want him to see people
enjoying doing things for the sake of it,
rather than hunting an end goal.
I want him to have a nose for questions.
I want him to know
that sometimes when we walked in the woods
with him on my chest in a sling,
and I needed to find a bush to have a wee,
I always made sure I didn’t hit his socks.
I want him to know that being weird is fine,
as long as you’re not hurting anyone.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

Whitney Houston is sitting
in the corner of our living room telling us
she wants to dance with somebody
on repeat and I don’t even know
where I keep my I.D. anymore.
I’d love to try and convince a man
three times my size to let me into
a dark space only to bump into people
I struggle to speak to in the daytime.
When I was 16
I would take my black socks off
and pull them over my white trainers
to pretend to bouncers I was wearing loafers.
I wonder if my teeth could still handle toffee vodka.
I wonder if my legs would now
have the confidence to leave
when they were ready.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

It’s the afternoon
and I’m reading on a park bench
waiting for a football
to hit me on the back of the head.
My wife’s not here
so no one will ask if I’m OK
and I’ll put my woolly hat back on
and think about that day at Uni
when my mate Andy
tried an overhead kick
on a concrete pitch.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

Written using sentences found by searching for ‘how’ in my WhatsApp search bar.

How dare you be older than when I first met you?
Young men should be forced to read Delia 1-3
before they are allowed to date.
How’s your teef?
I don’t remember that being how drunk works.
How is our gorgeous grandson?
Long story as to how I found him.
I’ve forgotten how to have a conversation.
How do we make it a tiny bit creamy?
I don’t know how you do it.
I don’t know how he does it.
How do you do it?
I’m just surprised how upset I am.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

I don’t know much
about ballroom dancing
but, as I understand it,
you have one person who leads
and another person who follows.
If it takes two to tango
but only one’s in charge,
I’d like to be the one who follows.
I want to let my leader free
and see the shapes they invent
and the space they fill
and let them paint
the example I desperately need
across a well-polished floor.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

When a digital watch
displays the seconds on your wrist
it’s hard not to think
it’s timing your every move.
Like how long you take peeling potatoes
or waiting for the green man
before crossing the road
or the number of seconds
from the first drip of a wee to the last.
What if it counts the length of your bad thoughts?
What if it tots up the hours you’ve spent
saying pacific instead of specific?
I don’t want to know how often I think
about the time we’ve missed together
or promising to wipe away that mould
compared to actually doing anything about it.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

A white toothed picket fence
stood stubborn,
gated lips locked shut,
gossip-drenched grass
desperate to meet curious feet.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

There’s a funeral on TV for a character called Carl.
The tiny church is only half full and the man
doing a reading barely knows the deceased.
He spends some time repeating his fear
of dying in the town he hates.
The only person crying is a baby and her mum
doesn’t care. She answers her phone
to swear at a man called Shaun.
One of the scene’s punchlines
is the description of Carl’s ungraceful suicide.
To spare anymore awkwardness
the wife of the reader sings Danny Boy
in a silly voice through red lipstick.
The 12 people in the crowd stand and join in.
Their faces fill with smiles and laughter.
Carl is in an open casket.
He is old and has a good head of hair.

© Carl Burkitt 2021