Lost Boys

We are like lost boys,
running round inside a lost house.
Lost in a place that folded like a note,
has been mislaid.

Someone, somewhere-
was meant to get a memo about us
but something went wrong and the paper
dissolved like water- and now we are here.

I don’t know what this place is.
It is a white cave of blind electric light
with lots of things in. It’s like a place
I half recall-like I’ve been here before-

but not here. This place is colder.
There are no doors and the windows
are frosted up with dust. We do not clean
them. We are just children. Lost boys,

a boy and a girl, you and me, we
have forgotten everything. There is mess.
We pick our way through it like goats
traversing rocks: Yellow eyed and hungry

making more with every step and our
corridors have collapsed with the weight of
clothes hooks. There is an upturned bag and
a dark red raincoat, pooling shiny

like heavy blood. This place has no rules.
We make them up then break them
Once, there was a place where even air smelt good.
A place like this, but not like this, a place that

Wasn’t lost. There was order, rhythms we could
understand. There was safety and reason and
context, like a compass, like a timepiece, like a
small brass metronome ticking in our hands.

Here, there are no clocks.
It gets dark and we know to sleep.
It gets light.