This morning I evicted my house.

I served it notice

through the kitchen door

and wandered away to the High Street.

A crystal shop shone

with bowls of bright gems.

If I had seen my grey cave lighten,

become a geode

prickling with rose quartz,

if I had thought bricks could radiate

gleams of tourmaline –

it wouldn’t be homeless.

Then juddering up the street, subjected,

tied to a lorry,

trembled my ex-house.

It passed me. Police cars screamed as I touched

my wall, my blind shell.

How it rocked, rocked, rocked.

Home is not ground-set, I know that now.

It keeps me. I will

ride my home always,

my dull pale pebble enclosing

emerald moss-agate

and obsidian

in its violet heart. It dances.

Home beyond boundary,

I will go with you.

Aren’t we custodians of the decorative

unimportant things that nurture us,

my arty friend asks. I say, why

bother so much. She says, they talk

in poetry, tercets indeed! and plays back

a recording of a bed, her guest-disposer,

an ancient decorative custodian:

‘Sleeper, my patterns

surround you,

lie in me,

soften my edges,

sleeper, my

down layers,

let them re-rest you,

shivering.

Sleep in me.’

However old I am, her bed is older.

Its dust mites eat me. It’s thin-

skinned, needs a sandblast

and a powder coat over its metal legs.

But what other bed has given anyone

half the holy full-ode treatment

of her old bed, however old we are?

cooking apples pears and plums are shaking green-wrapped

fists /

grains of me abrade those gaudy knuckles of

furled

buds / outspoken ideas of fruit in unfurl like

wild

offspring who hurl themselves down that steel slide / swing and

whoop

to earth singing watch me watch me and i do watch /

wave /

particles of me muons of my time wobbling /

why /

what truth haven’t i detected despite the hitch-

holds

of watching / i’ve been considering going back

home

as any newborn would when strangedom tastes of pill

grit –

hard gulp but going on keeps me safe from being

gone /