I followed you here

Through the ancient riffraff of

Explosive form

Bundled as a seed

Fallen (falling still)

Without cushion into the

Hard ground of winter

Where the soil is still frozen

Has been frozen

For one quarter century

In purity

One day (not long ago)

The sun broke through

And it wasn’t shrouded

With soot from the fires

That burned elsewhere

Soon roots sprouted and stunted

And changed direction and

Continued downward –

Through a dark place –

While everybody else

Grew up(wards)

And we felt forgotten

(and too big and too quiet and too strange)

So we continued down

Darker

And damper

And buried

(but still moving)

I followed you here

And we were buried together

Until the damp subsided

And the worms died

And we smelled something

That reminded us of before

(sage and sandalwood and soil and petrichor)

We followed our noses

Headfirst downwards

Towards the grounded sun

In yellow in blue in maroon

And we remembered

We were in a forest once

It came upon us like

When we used to drive through

Tunnels with our eyes closed

(one second it is dark and the next is bright and hurts your eyes)

Bombarded with vision

The world re-saturates

And it looks exactly the same

And entirely different

Exactly like waking up

From a nightmare to a room

Softened by nightlight

In the arms of somebody you’d die for

And exactly

Unlike anything

At all

And then we sank

And never stopped moving

All around and up and down

And to and fro

And wax and wane

And come together and fall apart

And always be golden

We always embrace now

Against the backdrop of

The Southern Coastline

In England