Some geezer with a thick beard and grubby
beanie started playing peekaboo with me
in Cheadle Hulme Costa. He put a hand
over his eyes then removed it but, the more
I smiled with no teeth, he upped his game.
He angled his head behind a Christmas hot
Chocolate promotional stand then returned
into view with shocked eyes and a round mouth,
then started jumping out from behind
a cream-coloured pillar waving his fingers.
He then began squatting down to the ground
and leaping out from a set of table and chairs.
He spilt his tea doing that one and I spat
Jammie Dodger crumbs out of my gob.
Mum grinned at me, her back to the geezer,
and told Aunt Kathy how she always makes me
laugh without moving a muscle.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

On this day
a man sitting by the lamp in café
told me my flies were undone
and my pants were poking out
and Albert Einstein presented
his quantum theory of light
in 1908 and the cinema screen
is so dark I just put a piece of
popcorn up my nostril.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

We press play on Remember the Titans
and hope this will be the time
that Gerry Bertier doesn’t get paralysed
from the waist down in a car crash
and gets to finish the football season
on the field with his mates
and he and Julius Campbell move out
to the same neighbourhood together
and get old and fat. We could do with
some of that.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

and I carried on.
My arms hit the ceiling
and the floor caught my knees.
He was outside ASDA,
his eyes long enough
to reach my top floor flat
on a tight angle. I took my T-shirt off.
I threw my hips against the window,
watched his baguette salute the sky.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

The barman asks if we’re together
and the woman on my right laughs
as hard as she would
in a poem designed to beat myself up.
I let my ego grow a pair of gruesome wings
made of old skin and greying pubic hair
and crash through the wall,
leaving bits of guts stuck to brick and cement.
I fly my way into a reluctant sky,
rooftops pretend to chat to each other.
I go fast enough for my spine to reject me,
the pores in my skin to scream bloody murder
and the corners of my lips rip wider
than a Chelsea smile saying
Haha, yeah, we’ve never met.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

When he goes into a café to do some writing
he holds his backpack high in front of his chest,
long enough for staff and customers to clock
its shape, colour, size, and the fact it belongs
to him so, in the event he needs to go
to the toilet at any point throughout the day
and anyone tries to steal or damage the bag,
someone will stop them. He does the same
thing with his heart.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

Spent the morning trying
to use my coiled tail as a pogo stick.
Didn’t work. Rolled in mud for a bit,
listened to a bloke telling his date
on the other side of the gate in my field
that I am in fact smarter than a dog.
Watched him talk about the benefits
of high intensity interval training,
recite his favourite Jay-Z lyrics,
lie about feeling comfortable
in his demanding office job, not
ask her a single question, recommend
an organic chorizo he’d seen on Kickstarter.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

They’re kicking each other.
They shouldn’t be kicking each other.
They should be kicking the football
into the goal.
I want a yogurt.
I want a strawberry yogurt.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

She doesn’t believe in dinosaurs.
She whacks another cod
in the deep fat fryer and tells her colleague
through a knuckle of chewing gum
that bones the size of a T-Rex’s leg have no business
walking about. She talks about dead liars,
how she only believes in what she can hold.
Her colleague pours vinegar
on an extra large portion of chips and says
if you can’t believe in the past
why invest yourself in the future. He tells me
they’ve sold out of Coke Zero, hands me my dinner,
tells me to come again soon.

© Carl Burkitt 2023

He sees a camel
on the cinema screen
and yells, CAMEL.
His mum smiles,
pinches a piece of
popcorn from his box
and doesn’t tell him
it’s a horse.

© Carl Burkitt 2023