There’s a woman at work who sings in the day.
We’re not talking De dum, hum de dum,
Today it was BAAABY, IT’S GONNA BE OKAAAY!
as she washed up a fork.
It made me think of crockery and cutlery
I’ve misused over the years.
That knife I used as a screwdriver, the teaspoon
I tested my kneecap reflexes with,
the plate I smashed over my head to impress a friend,
the salad bowl I filled with a volcano
from gone off meat, that fork my drunk fingers
used to attack my self esteem through my skin
the night everything changed.
Baby, it’s gonna be okay.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I died last night.
It was a thwack from a bus.
The day before it was slipping off a cliff.
The day before that I choked on a fish bone.
I die most nights. Not in nightmares,
but in between the dancing luminous eye worms
from blinking too tightly at the end of a long day
or in the quicksand of supermarket decisions.
I sometimes die when I’m over the moon,
or when a stranger says more than Hello.
I’ve never made it to the end of my funeral.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

A woman vomited right in front of my feet
in a busy high street tonight.
A part of me agreed with her.
She smiled, had some of my water and left.
It’s been a while since I was sick,
but I enjoy the sensation.
The bursting of a net holding back too many butterflies,
the clearing of a loft, a lumpy scream,
a volcano drowning open ears,
a body admitting what it doesn’t like
and taking the steps to sort things out.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

Finishing reading a good book is an odd feeling.
It’s like waving goodbye to university friends
at the end of your final year.
It’s like devouring a whole cheesecake
and waiting for the inevitable crash.
It’s plucking that chin hair then having
nothing to play with in boring work meetings.
It’s flushing that complicated poo and
walking back to your restaurant table and
not being able to discuss it with your blind date.
I put my completed book down on the coffee
table today in my empty flat and said
Well, what shall we do now? to a yucca plant.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I bought some white candy floss yesterday.
It looked and felt like a cloud, etc etc.
When my teeth chopped through it
a thousand invisible groundworkers
drilled
the enamel off my canines and molars.
The February rain was Dr Thomas’s spit
bursting through his mask.
The wind sliced through me
like the dental floss I never bought.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I spent last night on a slowly deflating air bed.
I was a broken plank in the ocean,
a fly in a slowly stirred soup,
the last bag on an airport conveyor belt.
My dreams were my awakes.
I felt like a slow motion action star
from the 70s falling from a cliff,
Tom Daley diving through custard,
the last seed to be found in a receding gum,
a helium balloon destined for the sun.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I’m stood between two men. The shoulders of
the guy to my left are almost wider than a door,
the man on my right has a chair-sized head.
The conversational jigsaw pieces they’re throwing
around the lift build the picture that they’re
colleagues on their way to a 4th floor meeting.
I forgot my laptop! Shoulders says.
Christ, me too! Head says. Dan’s gonna kill us.
The nervous silence is unbearable.
Just knock him out, I try, chuckling.
No way, Head says. You should see the size of him.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I just drank a cup of water
that tasted like onions.
Half a pint of dinner-prep tears.
If onions could cry, would you cut them?
I once cried peeling potatoes.
It was a Monday,
the living room was full,
I just wanted to be useful.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I got egg on me was a sentence I said today
to a man in the top tax bracket.
I wonder how many eggs he’s bought in his life.
I bet his past is an eggshell massacre,
his wheelie bin a Red Lion graveyard,
his kitchen a haunted house of yolk ghosts.
I bet the man has had more eggs than oxygen,
he just doesn’t wear them on his clothes.

© Carl Burkitt 2020

I spent the day with a serious man.
He was all elbows and straight lines.
Ironed shirt. Pressed suit. Creaseless skin.
Late afternoon he finally sat down, his trousers
riding up to reveal devil red socks. They looked like
Christmas stockings stuffed with disappointment,
strawberry laces wrapped around a bread stick,
a clown dressed as the Grim Reaper.
They were a chocolate chip in a digestive biscuit,
a bar brawl in a nunnery, a firework at a funeral.

© Carl Burkitt 2020