Do you sometimes see yourself in pictures and wonder

How you managed to stay alive, so unknowing

Of all the mangled eaves hushed over you,

Dangled soft in front of you, like a claw hammer and

A wish, playing in the mouth of the taped-off lane.

Ally had ridden down it

And I could see her caved-in head, a broken

Round vase, forbidden purpling and powdered glass

On the tarmac, and how my heart had pounded

What a normal thing it was to cry then, to cry and

Then to laugh, how they held my wrists and not my 

Hands, to avoid my eyes and the rumour water.

But she’d cycled back, so safe, sculpted

Fresh and translucent in the summer, annealed and beaming

Saying it was fine, saying a man would never catch her

Too fast and far too bright, and I could see her as an impala then

And never anything else, sheer prongs stuttered golden in the light.