burned deeply into his shoulder blade: We were only kids

larking about when this iron, set to Linen, set to Steam,

wasn’t plugged out at all and my little mate

Timothy held on petrified for ages before he dared rip it off

with a layer of burned, melted cheese attached.

Left me allergic to ironing rest of my life. Ha. Ha.

Anyroad, he’s striding up the beach, surfboard under arm.

No. He’s playing footie with the boy, sees a familiar

gait approach. He peers. He cries out. He gathers up the boy

and starts to run, shouting out he can’t believe I’ve come

after all this time, he can’t believe I’ve come.

The Glorious Gulf

I’m standing on the crystallized shore of the Kuwaiti desert. The blistered fingers of seaweed are entangled in my grasping toes; the gasping inhalations of my chest are pulling me towards another life.

My black pupils are swollen bubbles. Two scouting swallows tear through the membrane and flutter off, dip into the curve of the Gulf, disappear over the Arabian Sea and towards the concave mass of the Indian Ocean. They are showing me. The earth’s eternal centrifugal force is holding my world together. I can sense the submerged engine vibrating beneath my soles, making revolutions, yet I think I will fall off, or fly.

This is the plastic globe I once spun on my forefinger like a football, its geography reduced to minuscule printed nations, the countries I had to memorize, squiggles of borders I once carefully traced with a classroom compass: blue for water, green for forestry, gold for deserts. The meridians, zones, poles. What did it all mean to me then? That the world was 70 per cent water and floating continents, right? Another fact to ingest among the thousands of others called learning, from the breeze-block city called home, from where I took off, several lifetimes away.

And there, the equatorial line across my stomach, the fuse wire, the flaming roads behind me, each detonation has made me, the phantoms that came to me and turned my world around, the love that nearly consumed me, the death that I carried with me, the fires that forged me.

I feel like a monolith. I feel like a man now.

I have digested a small portion of the world and it has become me. Behind stand the modern, heat-shielding homes of Kuwait City, where the dismantled mountains of Egypt have been transported on to the oscillating sands of this roving kingdom. Their new foundations are bricks of black ingots. Behind is the city strung with pearls prised from the stubborn lips of deep-sea oysters by death-defying fishermen, who hunt for what they want in the subterranean depths.