I would think about it sometimes – 

that macabre statistical promise 

in my small imagining of the universe. 

How I would wear a lightning bolt 

on a shirt I have dreamt of but never found, 

and how in my interesting places 

people would recognise the loss in me. 

At some point, so I believed, I would have laid 

my eyes on his – predicting myself such futures. 

My expectations of the German Foreign Office were non-existent. 

On whatever sides of our own walls we land on 

we can breathe something out: something in. 

I pictured myself as older than I would be 

and the day was colder than I came to expect. 

There was no rain to shine on the tiles 

of the townhouse I didn’t own 

and I am sorry to report 

that I didn’t look at the world from an unexplored distance, 

or put out new hands in search of the wonderful. 

This poem was originally published in Issue 12 of Confluence Magazine