so long ago make all this with only 26 letters and no screen not even a petrol engine let alone Ryanair. You learn to abseil for charity from the side of Z Block, ten storeys. You never get the hang of the whiteboard but are first to the photocopier. The textbook with the tiring house of prodigious memory. You live in the canteen, 821, you and Nick Drake. The volumes are hardback and open with a creak, sprout slips of paper in your hands with facts and conjecture. You lie down in the pond because it’s also summer. What you see you never say. The fear and joy expand but you’re looking the other way. The mirror is all you are and almost everyone. At some stage this becomes a loft extension and cellar conversion with a few hundred square miles of country in between. You take a wrong turn but it’s still early. You don’t know and press on, and when you realise you press on. Abruptly you’re shrinking. Even you notice though you see it every day, like sneaking up. It’s because you are old, older, oldest. Somebody’s sex life for so long in your head takes up residence in another part of the body though unfortunately not that one. At night the sky is full of mostly black, then two or three binary stars, so many more than you knew and none of them visible to the naked eye. So, July, you stand last thing with binoculars and look at one phase of the moon in particular where someone from the future or a picture book waves and you wave back forgetting magnification is only ever one way. You might just as well whisper.

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