These people whirl and gabble while my mind, unravelling feeling skirts round my home, my man culled by a swirl of air, a crooked foot. My mother is there, brother, gran, their lives a two-week span of heaving a boxed past into fast forward earth deep-cut, rock close-cropped, a stony compass point. Here: outside, unsound, I am a broken joint cracked by longing, unsurrounded by you.next poem