My partner does not want me to write the 2004 words in our Monday Morning Writers Café. She wonders if I am craving for my ex, or hankering after my past life.
I tell her that absolutely that is not the case, but I do understand what she says when she says that she could be hurt by listening to my story, especially with our friends in the group, sat there alongside us.
Once the sun rose at four-thirty, once my heart skipped a beat; I will write this book, somehow to make worthy, or re-engender, the poems of my shuffling feet.
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, on my birthday, the 4th of February to be precise; nothing much else happened on that day, no photographs, no poetry, indeed no poems for another month.
I must look back into the boxes, surely I wrote something, though I have never put dates on my handwritten notes, I don’t know why, an early maladroit oversight; but once begun, forever kept up to.
The next photographs are in March, family snaps at home; by chance there is one of my favourite photographs - my ex is by the fire, possibly lighting the fire, on the television screen beside her, is a message which reads: Lost at Sea.
A perfect example I think of how it sometimes is good to both show and tell; it often adds to the articulation, in this instance it is right on the money, for me it is truly most effective.
There is a poem called Brussels, but I don’t remember going there in 2004; I did go three years later for my MA dissertation, I wrote poetry about art, about art in the cathedral, about art in the Musee des Beaux Arts.
The poem talks about the price of Drum tobacco in duty-free; now I have never been a fan of roll your own, when I did smoke it was king-sized filter tip - Peter Stuyvesant, or Camel Light.
So, if if I was looking to buy the loose stuff it must have been for someone else, maybe as a gift, or a warning.
I have chosen not to give up on this book, it is after all the final year before my relationship came apart for the last time, before finally coming to an end.
Might I see some signs; did I miss out on what was going on, or what was not going on.
In any event it is I who will raise the questions, also most likely it is I who will posit the answers.
Answers, such as they might or might not continue to be; let us hope occasionally the questions and answers are congruent.
The quotation at the front of the book is taken from Jonathan Stedall’s poem Trust, which is from his collection No Shore Too Far.
