Lines Written on Hove Promenade, Sunday Afternoon

I pause outside your room, and listen to the great churning of factory machines inside. I imagine you lulled into a nepenthe of sleep, a cathedral-like reverie of exhaustion. I have known you for years, but in your room I do not know you at all. The same must be said for me of course. I imagine you imagining me, and I know you fail, as I do, if you imagine at all.

There is a paradise in shutting the door of my room, no poison jibber-jabber of the babbling world (aside from the children of the Polish mother next door). There is a sense of loss though. A loneliness that is always in the rooms we sleep in alone.

What we need makes us mourn.

There is no room here. I'm sat on one of the seafront benches, on the first sunny day of the year. The late afternoon is ragged with the remains of the Brighton Marathon, and the cries of children, shocked into a joyful trauma by a day that actually seems like spring.

Both our rooms are silent now. I am listening to the sea and you are at work. Nothing moves there - nothing that I will see anyway - and there is a part of me that does not want to return.

I would prefer to sleep on the pebbles in the warm sun, let myself drop into sleep as the tide creeps up to cover us and all the rooms we pretend to own.