Don’t worry
I’ll be a professional wrestler one day
and we’ll squeeze ourselves into rental cars
and talk about the size of our thighs
and how daft John was throwing himself
off that balcony on to Pete(?)
and the way Jemima elbowed Claire’s neck
and the 68-strong audience in Albany
and the scent of death in the dressing room
and the little kid in the front row who had
your t-shirt on and no teeth and no parents
and was so convinced I was a bad guy
he flicked an M&M into my eye and asked me
how do I sleep at night hurting you every day.

Carl Burkitt 2024

After Purple Mountains

Friends are warmer than gold, when you’re old, the man in my ears is telling me. He’s singing about his happiness and how it’s all gone. How he makes strangers everywhere he goes. Well, for once the man singing these things is not me. I’m too busy looking out the window and picking toast crumbs from my teeth. Goodness me, the man seems quite sad, he reckons some of the strangers he meets are people he was once happy to know. He keeps pressing on though, and that’s why I’m not sure whether the man singing is me or not. He’s barely hanging on, and I can remember a time when my fingers nearly slipped off the windowsill. I don’t think I was holding on then, something or someone else was. I was just there, you know? 10,000 afternoons ago this man’s happiness overflowed. That sounds nice, you know? But I think I know what he means. You can definitely eat too much ice cream or stay at the party for too long before you realise all your happiness is gone. It’s time to press on.

Carl Burkitt 2024

I have a gym bag now.
I keep things in it.
I keep things in my gym bag like
a padlock for a gym locker to hold my gym bag,
a pair of gym trainers for my gym feet,
a pair of gym shorts for my gym bum (and gym willy),
a mini deodorant for my mini gym armpits,
a banana for my gym tummy,
a pen for my gym thoughts,
a part of my brain that hates my gym body,
a part of my brain that knows gyms are silly.

Carl Burkitt 2024

I don’t ask questions anymore.
I enter rooms and nod at demands.
I get on the floor and do something
that has never been done before.
I don’t ask questions anymore.
I enter rooms and nod at demands.
I don’t think. I just do. And hope
I don’t cock up the dreams of an architect.

Carl Burkitt 2024

A knock-off Erling Haaland Manchester City kit
is stretched over his blue dressing gown-style jumper
like the Cookie Monster has been forced to watch
a football team he knows nothing about
by his father-in-law. His hands are two packets
of blueberries. His legs are blue raspberry ice pops.
His eyes are oceans, or something less poorly described.
I think about his veins when I’m bored, the way they
sit high under his skin, his blood desperate for me
to see it, to tell me not to go to work tomorrow
and to sit with him on our humpback whale sofa
and practice taking penalties in the living room.

Carl Burkitt 2024

Football. Food. Fork. No. No. No.
Fudge bar. Flat. Fart. No. No. No.
Fone. Foto. Feasant. No. No. No.
Fumb. Finking. Free. No. No. No.
Face. Freckles. Feelings. Falling
into a future of fear and fun and
failure and fantasy and fear and
fuck ups and fairies and fear and
flight and fear and fight and fear
and fear and fear and frog. Yep.

Carl Burkitt 2024

The sound of a 17-year-old struggling
to navigate a roll cage of cheese and squeeze
through ASDA aisles stuffed with New Year’s Eve
shoppers is enough to send me back in time.
I stacked ham, sausages, turkeys on shelves
like dead baubles on a butcher’s Christmas tree.
I wasn’t old enough to drink but my breath stank
of Dooley’s most Sunday mornings, my lips dripped
with in-jokes made with other teenagers
dressed in a blue and orange uniform
who didn’t care, but we did
in our bones, enjoy understanding the importance
of stock rotation, the responsibility of holding
a reduction gun, the chance to use heavy machinery,
seeing teachers in their weekend clothes,
being respected by the parents of friends,
being a part of a gang that fed the town.

Carl Burkitt 2023

What do angry mice send at Christmas?
Cross mouse cards,
according to the Christmas cracker joke.
And while the little strip of paper
makes no one around the table laugh
it also doesn’t get across the importance
of those frustrated mice reaching out
to family and friends during times of conflict,
making the effort to tease a future of resolution,
reminding them of softer, fluffier times,
and how tricky it must’ve been to do all that
with such little paws.

Carl Burkitt 2023

He’s on the sofa,
straight-backed with a chest built
from exercise and soft drinks,
a paper Christmas cracker hat on his head.
He realises he forgot to tell us
his wife is pregnant, but we could tell
he’s preparing to become a father, to age,
to get ready to be one of two people
in a house who needs to have all the answers
to stuff he ultimately doesn’t care about
when he asked his weekend’s host,
Can you overcook a chutney?

Carl Burkitt 2023

trotting
in
trainers
new
or
plopping
in a
stranger’s
loo
it’s up
to you
which is
true

Carl Burkitt 2023