I changed schools and tried to manage the terror of exams.
I expanded my collection
of geological specimens from the solid British Isles,
had good manners at the dinner table, a proper accent.
Elsewhere, out on my bike, I deferred
to words like ‘berk’ and ‘blimey’.
My mother continued to be unstable.
Wept. My father read the New Statesman.
They said, maybe it would’ve been better to get away.
We managed Paris. I smoked fags.
‘Love is all you need’, I sang, and fell in love.
I’d stopped praying. Prayed.
Existentialism was the rage.
Further on than this, as if in a pea souper,
the other life gets small and blurry.
Except in it, reminded, I think of flying return
to summer in Australia
– though our winters now are milder, clearer –
to get a hint of what might have been,
unfreeze a kind of parallel existence.
I let it drop, overnight, like rainwater.