My eyes sit above two black bags.
I can’t take them out on a Sunday night,
but they’re constantly filled
with all sorts of rubbish:
the rotting peels of over-ripe thoughts,
empty crisps packets laced with shame dust,
skeletons of anxiety,
the pips of awkwardness,
the skins of fear.
Today they’re stuffed with leftovers
of preparing for the future.
They’re bulging with wrinkled smiles.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

Every so often
I can feel
a bumble bee
bouncing
inside my skull
trying its best
to make honey.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

It was a Tuesday or a Thursday or a Sunday
and I was 19 or seven or 31
and the room smelled of chips or pork or egg
and the wallpaper was blue or green or paint
and the weather was snow or wet or hot
and the car was a car or a boat or a car
and the night was a day or a morning or a lunch
and I was you or me or the moon
and there was music or birds or lightening
and it doesn’t matter because it happened
and nothing was real anymore.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I got doorstepped by a crumble.
A friendly foiled paparazzi.
A tray of apples picked from thoughtful trees
sprinkled with sugar by fingers I can’t remember.
Earth has a two-metre circumference
and I don’t know how to yell
a smile that far yet.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

Too often
my phone is a grenade
thrown into the living room
by people I forget exist
when trying to breathe
through my day.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

Muscle jelly time.
Memory blender.
Tucking in the eye blankets.
Return ticket to Snooze Island.
Reunion with the past.
A monster’s morning.
Break time for the bulbs.
Dribble pillow.
Unconscious trump session.
Slow motion musical statues.
Show time for the ghosts.
Upsetting preview of
the world’s most distressing head film.
Saucy blood flow.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

If we could choose
the form of our cremated ashes
I would opt for the dust on a Frazzle.
I would gather under your finger nails.
I would burrow inside your molars.
I would linger on your finger tips.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

If I were a shepherd
I’d ask people to call me Shep.
I’d give all the lambs nicknames too,
things like Bud, Dot Cotton and Woolf.
In December I would paint my crook
with red and white stripes
and wear a tea towel on my head, the one
that made me cry during the ‘92 Nativity.
I’d wander the planet and hunt down the sheep
you scared away in Wales to explain it was an accident.
It’s sad thinking that sheep’s likely dead now too.
So I don’t think that.
I think about it hopping across the damp grass
dodging your clumsy swear word bullets
and giggling as your face hits the mud,
grateful for the chance to grow and be free.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I was smiling in my sleep
then woken by a different smile
to tell me I was smiling in my sleep.
As I moved my concrete head,
trying to smile in my awake,
the room was a scream at the sight
of the pillowed side of my face
smothered in blood.
I’d had an unconscious nose bleed,
smiling as it slowly drowned me.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

Silent ceilings.
Toes turning into grass.
Climbing a post film mountain with a piss-filled bladder.
A back door.
The near death experience of carrying a week’s
worth of washing down a staircase with no eyes.

© Carl Burkitt 2020