Good at maths

Sometimes my guts feel like a Northern maritime town,
plastered with kitschy painted signs and tainted with
a whiff of basic takeaway fare, the fun fair that never

gave up the ghost train in this, a Victorian ghost town.
My blood sits quite like Lake Windermere, the coastal-
copycat hamlets, my cells the GCSE geography field

trip kids that come here, pumping air in their hair in a
clapped-out homemade motor boat with two gears,
backwards and forwards. As for my brain? Well, it

long discovered you can get to Spain for the price of a
train ticket to Brighton. But it's good at mathematics
for stats dodge the demons and dodgems, the grey mist,

the childhood-homesick dances. Numbers are absolute.
Numbers are answers. My legs want to move on, they're
pulling away. I'll talk to you about this another day.