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I've recently been relishing in my free will, going places alone, allowing myself the quiet, unhurried compassion my parents never gave. And I have noticed that I find myself drawn into old churches. They are, undeniably, beautiful. Sometimes in a grand, golden, organ-blasting way. And sometimes in a still, stale, patient way, with crumbling walls and worm-eaten wood, and the echoes of others who wandered in across the years. I have started, perhaps, to understand how the grandeur of it all, how feeling part of something much bigger than yourself, allows you to draw inwards, quietly, intimately - only yourself, and all that you cannot see, are listening.
As I have aged, I have definitely shed some nihilism. I am less afraid of others. I am less ashamed. I seek sensuality and meaning.
In the winter just gone, I sat in a pub with someone I was starting to love, both of us on the same side of the table. A teapot and a half-pint of cider between us. Warm lights and condensation hanging on the windows. We started talking about death, and how I was afraid of it. Afraid of everything ending, everything only existing because I exist to experience it. I think you found that silly and selfish. It made you feel better to think that those you admire lived and died before you, with you. You explained how people outlive themselves in others' memories, in the way they change each other. And now I like to think that I changed the world a little because I loved you.
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I wonder if you ever think about us -
Two little girls sat on the railway bridge,
watching the sky turn pink.
Feeling as free as eleven year olds can as we ate through a bag of sunflower seeds and tossed the shells over the edge.
I crossed that bridge today (I haven’t left)
I googled you and a picture came up
You look just like your mother
who used to feed us watery chicken soup and carry that bratty little dog around
I don’t miss that bratty little dog
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Thunder purrs through the hot, dry Parisian air in anticipation.
Grey cobbles and stained glass and lumps of moss whisper to each other of the rain’s arrival.
Oh, what will I do when she finally falls?
No head-cover amongst the headstones.
I think of your book turning to pulp in my bag
and, in turn, I think of you.
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New flat, new bed, new shoes. New walk home in the dark through streets with wide pavements and tall houses and stained glass doors,
Damp air carries the scent of magnolia pollen, trees flowering in every other front garden,
These streets feel safe to the point of sterility
I want to lie in the road like the felled tree and think about things I can't change
And I think, I think I’d be fine. I’d get up and go home and go to bed
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The river holds many things.
She holds boats on her back: races, visitors, homes,
She holds the moonlight
and she throws it back up at me like confetti .
She holds my hand when all I can do is watch her
She laps at bottles graced by long-gone mouths
She carries memories downstream of sticks thrown in by children,
Of toes dipped in
She whispers to us as we kiss on the pier
I take you to her, all of you, and you don’t even realise.
I am nothing if not a girl held by the rise and fall of her breast
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And on this day
I feel lucky to have skin lighter than my father’s, than my grandma's,
“Please come come safely”
She says,
And I listen
Even though I want to stand on the street and shout
But I know she’s scared
And I tell my friends to stay inside too.
They plan to gather on the Golden Mile -
So-called because of the factories that lined the road some 60 years ago
They’ll chant “off our streets” while walking the same path that bore my grandma’s footsteps home from work,
15 years of her life spent packing biscuits which sat nice and pretty on the table with your imported tea,
Until the factory closed
because they realised they could pay another woman
in another place
pennies for those biscuits
and not have to to look her in the eyes.
And my grandad, a lifelong vegetarian, made his way home stinking of the dog food factory,
His Indian law degree gathering dust on the living room wall,
“Stealing your jobs”.
And in the end, the enemies of the working class are not travelling on dinghies, they’re travelling on private jets
They’re laughing at white working class Britons as you blame the brown ones,
They’ve been seeding you for years
They’re throwing us into a ring and shouting “fight”.
And they watch, unseen, from the balconies as they take money from our education,
Sell our healthcare,
Keep us down under their thumb,
Lining their pockets as they knock down family homes and build flats for offshore billionaires,
And do you prefer those billionaires because they’re off your streets?
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