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WARM UP   Imagine that you are chewing a piece of gum Chew it Focus on the thought of it You might chew it on one side of your mouth, then the other Now the gum is expanding Really work on it The thought of it The gum of the thought Now the gum is made of an idea Focus on the thought of the gum of the thought The idea is heavy, it’s scratching at the roof of your mouth It’s as if there are feathers in the gum Crows feathers Chew it Now the gum is made of crow You might feel a beak complaining against one side of your mouth, then the other Now the gum is a crow Focus on the thought of it There might be blood The crow might want to screech, and you can let it, just keep chewing Really work on it Now the crow is expanding Your jaw muscles should be good and warm now Spit out the crow Think about what you’ve done     THE ROEBUCK INN   to take the edge off we say, like an excuse or an incantation,   across the bar at each other or to no one in particular   drinking in rounds until all our edges are piled up on the carpet   like how girls put their bags in the middle of the dancefloor of Lloyds Bar at the weekend   until we’re standing there with no edges at all all colour and warmth   bleeding into the night like petrol skirting the surface of the water in the gutter     ODE TO ASH   sometimes a while after I’ve flicked you off the end of my fag part of you will land on the crook of skin that joins my thumb and index finger having been carried by the breeze up in little spirals and down again to land on me and I want to jump up like our dog Libby when she was just a puppy seeing her first snowfall trying to catch each slow-falling flake in her mouth   sometimes part of you will land in my coffee and I will drink it anyway yes  sometimes it’s raining and you fall quickly encased in a drop of water and make a small mud pie on the brick of the front yard sometimes you collect in little piles at the foot of Grandma’s chair or else bruise her small patch of sky above Bramcote Crematorium   other times