Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

The first time we met you asked how  

I’d be spending the night –  

a couple of Coronas, Lowry and Calexico  

if I remember it right  

that book – or was it a life? – of letters, poems, fragments.  

You let yourself out in increments.  

Best-liked Chinese dish here (sweet and sour prawns?),  

a painter there (Chris Ofili and was it Wassily Kandinsky?).  

The Beatles (White Album, George, your mother’s city).  

We stopped talking one day  

but we weren’t really talking by that stage anyway.  

Just pitting messages against one another.  

A channel between us and everything meagre, everything  

  scrap  

where you wanted honest fodder.  

The one time I flew over to visit  

I looked out of the window for the whole flight.  

Imagined all the living being done unseen, implicit,  

in each minuscule, framed, portion of sea.