We sit at the top of the playground slide,
talk of the shine in a city elsewhere. Yet we’re
moths, you and I, dancing around northern street lamps,
trapped by some false light in our small-time town
that keeps hearts and wings from turning south.
Then everything falls silent, and we know,
know for one brief moment of teenage clarity,
that life will be good and worth the wait.

And we each hold the new knowing
close to our ribs, and don’t speak of it,

just in case it isn’t true.

On the way home your train has ground to a halt
in the wilderness and you wait with Salome for a tram
under the scaffold wrapped round John the Baptist’s dome.
A thick-set man, driving a Fed-Ex, jumps the pelican.
On his porcine pinkie, a precarious phone is poised beneath
his chinny-chin-chin. He’s abusing the void, calling
You-Know-Who, Who can’t come to the phone right now.
You tell Salome you spent the best of Tuesday training.

Learning not to play what’s there in a repurposed chapel,
you glossed your teeth wrong-handed, shiatsu’d a new North.

You built a lofty giraffe from sheets of a Daily Telegraph.

“Everyone is Welcome Here” – WHQ

In voluntary exile, I travelled north at the end of a century,
found the headquarters of the world on a street in Newcastle.
Every Thursday Friday Saturday night, muscle memory carried me
from The Forth, from The Tele’, from The World-Famous Trent House,
a holy trinity of pubs all leading to Worldies, where whatever shade
your skin, you were welcome. The dance floor was an embrace.
Music flooded my ears, poured out of my body as sweat
and at the bar, I drank in language, bathed in dialect.

For once in a lifetime, we had it sussed. Here was an extended family
of our own choosing. Nowhere felt more like home,

a version of the world that doesn’t exist.

My babies were born in the South, now we are all packed in a van,
inching along the M5. Northbound.
Our house packed in boxes; half neatly labelled,
half thrown in anyhow. Nuts and bolts rolling free in the bottom,
reassembling furniture promises to be interesting.
My babies sleep amongst favourite toys,
unaware of their shift in gravity, this homecoming,
their roots are unearthed, about to be re-potted.

A lorry is on the hard shoulder. Cab ablaze.
As we crawl past this moment is seared into my memory:

We pass and race away homewards, while behind us the road is closed.

There’s no sense of her left here. Nothing but
Empty rooms and blank space. No dust, no small
Marks, no odd bits or unnoticed fragments
That would bring up a life. Gone. Someone’s cleared
The place of her too well. And I can’t put
My finger on it, but it feels wrong, all
Of her is gone and no one cares she went.
Surely, a few dry needles from her tree

Of life cling here like femmer ghosts? They don’t,
Of course. Her sort never makes history.

You get what you make of life. Or you won’t.

I look behind at everything I felt was safe –
boring, as I used to moan. Rented bricks, laddering
tight terraces with fretful cracks, plastered back to health
with licks and promises. Steps scrubbed clean each week; brass
polished to reflect the purity of soul; doors ajar to trumpet
trust. Every dinner preordained by day till Friday fish;
telly set in stone. Once I’d left the pit, I gulped down
fresher air, frittering my coal stocks in the south.

The miners’ cottages are matched in Antique Mist,
garden storage where the outside lavs had been.

I see the smoke rise from the new wood-burning stoves and smile.

They say that exile clarifies things – who can tell?
To ask ‘county or country’ is to miss the point,
it’s not something that’s easy to articulate
and neither is it a matter of volition.
We stop for a sandwich in the leeward shelter
of a dry-stone wall on a high Pennine ridge.
A profound, wordless conversation is unfolding –
I could be with my father, or with my own daughter.

The sky is stoic; by turns threatening and comforting.
We look down on the cities while we yearn for the moors –

we carry this with us wherever; forever.

We ran down the jigger, past paint-peeled doors
that closed each tiny yard behind the back-to-backs;
we kicked and scarpered, but nothing happened:
no bugger in shirt sleeves came out shouting;
no prune-faced dog offered us its teeth;
no shrill voice screamed; no threats, no chase,
no scuffer bashing his boots on the flags.
What’s mischief for, if no one notices?

Later, such light transgressions yielded
to the more painful, practised wrongs

it is our triumph to excel at.

All the signs are gagged, bandaged in snow,
that still spirals down, shrinking the dwindling triangle
on the windscreen. You have to keep going
– the child in the back – to the steep cobbled street
where he clings to your waist, hobbling black ice.
Home spits in your face, sinks you in slush,
slaps down your hopes like a wounded mother
in some cold-blooded myth, testing you.

Until he arrives, flies a red kite, holds your boy’s hand,
holds you, hot in the morning, hooped in a dawning of trust.

The thaw starts. It tests you that he stays, and you stayed.

Between darkness and darkness, through a gap
in blackout curtains, I watch the washed-out
northern sun as it crawls, like an albino
spider across a gable of bone-white brick –
listen to the pair with nothing to say
to each other, sit on the wall and say
it at length – imagine a world where all
directions matter, not only here, only

north, only you as you drew me: magnet
to my compass; lighted mead-hall to my

sparrow, in its moment out of the night.