Spaces

Where friends once lived

Friend-shaped spaces

Walking along Brighton sea front
A bag of fish and chips
A sharp sea breeze chopping up the past

An old train ticket to Rochester
found in a favourite jacket
Standing next to Lennon in the cathedral loos

A jacket, clothes, blankets…

Imagine a tent, caught in a ferocious gale
pegs ripped from the ground
flapping through the air

From school laughter
and the smell of paint and charcoal
to a hospital bed

And now, another space
that can never be filled in

How big is that space?
The size of a room? Of a stadium?
A planet’s atmosphere?

And these spaces clump together
like magnetic poles
into a huge emptiness
an enormous why

Can we ever know many holes it takes
to fill the Albert Hall?
You saw Clapton there…
Stray images fly
Caught in the sunlight, like dust
Dust to dust
Dust is never in short supply