the first poem i've written since moving back to london.

I feel life starting like waves crashing on the shore in recurring dreams

east end streets crowded in the evenings with the energy of elsewhere

ramadan passing outside barber shops and boys who are all talk on the corner

offer me drugs on saturday night after work. now I finally understand the weekend,

I suppose this is adulthood. well, didn’t it just slip in through the back door?

not far between cambridge and cambridge heath but don’t the nights smell different,

with the rain falling on cable street the day after blackshirts in wifebeaters

tried their luck a second time. the words don’t come easily to me like they did -

that’s a kind of innocence, I traded it for that easy confidence you buy with

weekly essays and white stones. circling back to the place I was born I find it foreign,

circling back to the old words I find they’re coming unbidden like sickness or passion

they pass just as fast. walking the ditches and fields of the city like ley lines that might lead

to some essential truth, brushing cold shoulders with the suits that seem unburdened

by the history lying grave deep beneath us, I remember we promised to live on for

those we left in the earth, to feel life crashing like the waves, retreating only to return.