This poem imagines a young girl who has moved across the country to a new home, a new school and a new start. Facing uncertainty in her home life, she decides that she needs the stability of a best friend, and so she seeks one out.

This is another poem that was written a long time ago (20+ years), and which I’ve only recently rediscovered and reworked. I seem to remember reading about ‘love’ hotels, and I just found myself wanting to write about rooms that were ‘rented by the hour’, digging deeper into the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of the people that were frequenting them.

Today’s the day that I officially mark the start of my 7th decade on this planet. Like many of you, I’m learning that aging is not at all how I thought it would be. My earliest birthday memories are from my fifth birthday. I remember that I had a birthday party, attended by my newly-minted friends from school. I remember some of my birthday gifts, and can even remember how they smelled. Board games of the 60s had a very distinctive boardgamey smell, or at least they do in my memories.

This is another blast from the past, and one from ‘The Final Carrot’ days. I am always amazed at the level of detail that is stored away in our memories, if only we look hard enough. I do remember getting so frustrated when I was told that I couldn’t have something or wasn’t allowed to do something, because one or both of my brothers had been afforded that liberty in the past, and it had gone badly.

Today, I read the most heartwarming article in The Guardian, that seemed to be begging me to write this poem. The article was about a batch of letters, that had retrieved from a shipwreck, that was sunk off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat in 1941. Among the 717 letters recovered from the SS Gairsoppa, were fragments of a 1941 love letter to a woman named Iris.

My favorite piece of clothing back then was my scarlet mohair jumper. I’d called around at Pete Monk’s house one time (Pete was the rhythm guitarist with The Spasms), and his mum was just sewing up a mohair jumper that she’d just knitted for someone. “I’ll make you one”, she said, pointing to a color chart on the table, before adding “pick your color”. It was almost as if I didn’t have a choice in the matter, and I certainly didn’t want to offend her, so I picked scarlet. I was over at Pete’s house again, a week later, when she proudly presented me with the finished item.

This poem dates back to 1997, when I had been living in the US for 2 years. I was feeling lost, and desperately wanted to belong. I’d gone to a local Farmer’s Market, which had a diner-style counter, and I tucked myself in for the duration. Armed with my ever-present notebook, I was listening intently as other patrons came and went around me. As they’d casually catch up on life with the waitress, they’d somehow slip in an order for their usual, in a shorthand exchange that was inaccessible and yet strangely beguiling to me.