Taking my first girlfriend
to the pub at seventeen
Crossing the cobbles
of a gunmetal grey 
northern market town
Mitten in glove
warm in our teenage
prototype version of love
A chatterbox pint for me
a tipsy glass of white for her
and we’d find a quiet corner

Invariably, some red-faced
shaven-headed native
furtively eyes my companion
“Where do you come from?”
they’d splutter in their arrogance
“I’m from here” casually she’d lilt
“I mean, originally” they’d spit
“I was born and raised here” she’d softly smile
“But your skin, your eyes, you’re not English”
My heckles rise, her sadness spirals
another evening disfigured
by the spilled white paint of ignorance

She confesses, between kisses
of sobbing tears behind closed eyelids
diminished by sore encounters
shrunken by miniscule minds
How confusing to be from here
Yet made to feel you don’t belong
Then we’re edging off our stools
slipping out the door, thrust back into
the tarnished romance and rainy ruin
of a clumsily decorated market square
tattered tinsel droops with freezing sleet
on a crooked caged Christmas tree

And I’d be sighing to myself
‘This… this is where I come from…’
 

[2023]