I guess we’ll never grow up
if we sit in our separate offices
for 20 years sharing music
that taught us to grieve alone.
I remember the first pair of jeans
you told me to buy. My legs
never looked longer and my arse
never tighter. I will never know
the things we said but they still exist
in the ears of teenagers who knew
nothing and absolutely everything.
I can see them now, dancing
in West Swindon until the moon
had the confidence to put a full stop
on our movie reviews and ability
to keep each other safe in the knowledge
we know what we’re doing.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening too ‘Beautiful Strangers’ by Kevin Morby.

Screw it,
I’ve got my school shirt untucked
and my tie is looser than it was this morning.
Some of the lads are talking about drugs
and how they smashed up a For Sale sign
outside a neighbour’s house last night.
I’m waiting for English class to start
wondering when Kurt Cobain will be added
to the syllabus and slagging off the dinner ladies
for not letting me have more than two
battered sausages at snack time.
Some of the lads are talking about drugs
and how they put a football through
a shop window last night. I was considering
doing some graffiti on my desk with a Biro
but Sir’s just arrived.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘Polly’ by Nirvana.

At your 10th birthday party
your dad stuck a noodle so far up his nose
it poked down into his mouth. He grabbed
the nostril end with one hand,
the tonsil end with the other and
“flossed his brain”. We laughed like we invented it.
For the seven lunchtimes in a row
after that day, you threw my pears
into the sand pit and stood on my yogurts.
When Facebook told me your heart stopped
suddenly in the night 20 years later,
I’m glad all I could think about was the noodle.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘Playground Love’ by Air.

You climb into your parents’ bed,
sit between their yawns and sing
how London Bridge is falling down.
You tell them you were born in London
and there is another bridge in London
called Tower Bridge and that is your favourite
but you don’t think there’s a song about that
so you keeping singing about London Bridge
falling down. You ask how small you were
when you lived in London and your parents remember
a body the length of three Oyster Cards.
They remember eyes wider than a gap to mind
and a flat too small to hold all the love handed
to them by a St. George after seven blurred days.
“Oh no!” you say before running to your room
and returning with a stuffed Ben Big toy
taller than your time as a cockney.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘London Bridge’ by The Teskey Brothers.

When I step in grass wearing no shoes or socks
I pretend I know how to play the guitar
and can cook red lentils
without making them too mushy.
I tell people the names of trees,
the purpose of moths, the shapes of constellations.
As my toes sink into soil
I forget the way I like freshly ironed shirts
or how the thought of having to pack a bag
for just one night away dissolves my spine.
When me heels dig into the world
I can start a fire with only my thumbs
and long for a fish to catch with my bare palms.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘The Creggan White Hare’ by Daoirí Farrell.

You took off your elbow pad off,
threw it to the back row of the arena
with ease, skipped over my broken body
on the floor, bounced off the ropes
quicker than Cupid’s bow firing an arrow.
You stopped, stood over me,
inhaled the cheers from a crowd
who knew what was coming.
And with that you
dropped your elbow onto my heart,
the ref slapped the mat
one…two…three hundred years and more.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘You and Me on the Rock’ by Brandi Carlisle.

You take my hand
to make me feel like I am protecting you
while you walk across a one-foot high wall.
Your body is doing all the work,
my hand could be doing anything:
learning how to make pizza dough,
sewing up the holes in your pyjama trousers,
remembering how to fold stunt paper airplanes,
picking at the scabs of when I used to hurt myself,
tracing the shape of your body
from the curls we share to the fingers
you used to take mine in your first minutes
on a wall we’re walking forever.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘Thunder Road’ by Bruce Springsteen.

In your hometown
the sun takes its time
to peel off its duvet clouds.
But it’s there every day
when it rains short As, cobs and barms.
Wet tarmac is a disco ball
for you to dance through
the orchestra of strangers playing
“Alright pal”. You know the names of
landlords, dry cleaners, the uncle of
two friends from your pre-school.
You have chosen between blue and red.
You are asked about. You are recognised.
You are seen. Trains are frequent –
a chance for you to take time
as seriously as it takes you.
You, my son, are a northerner.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘My Hometown’ by Bruce Springsteen.

He likes living in the top floor flat.
He says it makes grown ups down
on the street look smaller than him.
Not many toddlers get to
see the top of a bin lorry or wave
at the local dry cleaner pretending
they are sitting on a cloud. Planes are
not intimidating when you can grab them
out of the sky. Is morning even a morning
without making eye contact
with a family of sparrows standing on
the chimney of a second hand furniture shop?
He says he likes living in the top floor flat
and promises we’ll have a garden
when his daddy is an adult.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘Such Great Heights’ by Iron & Wine.

He ripped the thatched roof off a pub once…
I say it, not for the first time, to the question
“What’s your dad like?”
The gap before I add “…with his lorry”
gives the person I’m talking to the chance
to get a scale of the man’s hands. It sets up
an image of outrageous shoulders
that carried a family’s safety
through dark country lanes and long night shifts.
It presents a power to remove danger,
threaten anything that may hold us back.
The lorry delivers the clumsiness,
the clown make up on a circus lion
desperate to bite the head off anything that teases.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Written while listening to ‘Highway to Hell’ by AC/DC.