This is the home.

The skin, a ghostly canvas of pinprick pores

and watercolour wash of tiger’s hide.

Stark and white as the surgeon’s gauze.

All accept the hands.

Cold to touch, yet fire-brand, red and rough.

Wise before their time.

The sleeve with the crescent lick of an irons tongue,

which soured and pillowed when I was young

in the chlorine baths of Athens.

A fixed, seared streak, which when I brown

grins a glow of pearly crowns.

The echo of a scar upon my head,

glued together in a hospital bed

when I was only one,

and tumbled down a single stair

onto threadbare Victorian rugs.

The elbow, which aches when bent or straight,

like it’s swung the weight of a racket all its life.

The hip that clicks its metal ticks,

of bolts and cogs and rubbing sprockets.

This is the body that houses the thoughts,

the compulsory patterns, the repetitive taunts.

This is the house which haunts this home,

inch by inch, once walls of Stone.