| I am born by Caesarian section at 9: 30 AM
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| in Princess Mary’s Maternity Hospital
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| on the 24th May, sixty years ago today,
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| dangled by the ankle, smacked across the bum,
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| swaddled in a blanket howling like a wheel.
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| My big brother Iain on his tip-toes hisses 'I don’t like him'.
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| He’s Maradona, I’m Peter Beardsley, chasing a ball through the mud
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| followed by the kitchen window, bellowing through the fern:
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| 'Boys! |
| Dinner’s ready!'
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| Dad is tuning in the telly beyond a heaving mountain of spaghetti hoops.
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| I am nothing
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| You are nothing
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| Nothing important
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| Death within a dream
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| Petrified on the back of a pedallo in the Balearic Sea off Alcudia
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| I can see the ghost of my uncle Derek waving to us from the beach,
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| gently drifting out of reach,
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| the telephone reciever swinging by its cord,
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| a glass of broken beer expanding on the lino.
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| My mam slips into the coffin
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| a polaroid of his sweetheart
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| Clutching Good-Luck Bear I peer gingerly over the side,
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| press my nose up to the tide,
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| and there behold a barracuda chewing on a chrysanthemum
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| and a family of clownfish hovering in the corpse’s hair.
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| In the scullery of the cub-hut my clarinet falls
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| into a sack of flour — a flurry of pins
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| squashed into the leather handle
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| a crescent moon of stricken fig-wasps.
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| Drizzling my fingers with The Magic Sponge
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| Dad says 'we'll probably have to chop them off'.
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| He collapses like a canvas tent on the floodlit astroturf
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| rent with a fibula guide-rod poking a hole through his shin
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| There are teardrops in his moustache
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| charging a flute of champagne
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| down the aisle and out for a throw-in
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| A St. John ambulance careers between the sugary pillars of the wedding cake
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| A crystal spoon
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| A pewter tankard
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| these words inscribed upon the base:
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| HAPPY RETIREMENT BEST GRANDDAD IN THE WORLD
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| A toby jug filled to the brim with curtain hooks
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| A sheepskin rug discoloured with tobacco smoke
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| within it’s braids concealed a rank
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| of plastic soldiers set to burst underfoot
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| Berwick in oils: a skiff on the swollen tweed
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| cradling a false pearl
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| a ceramic seraph
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| with an ashtray for a brain
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| — and I don’t care about these things
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| Why do they remain so clear while the faces of my loved ones disappear?
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| A Rington’s plate
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| a forking hairline seam of superglue through the Black Gate
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| a digital photoframe
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| frozen on an blurry orange thumb
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| I remember all these things
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| Old karate trophies
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| I am tethered by these things
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| Thimbles and pesatas
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| I remember all these things
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| A roll of Woolworth’s price stickers
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| I can see all these things but
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| where have all my people gone?
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| In the end it wasn’t meant to be.
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| He was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen.
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| He survived for seven days
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| before he slipped away |