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Birthday Sessions tracks 5-18

Only that it seemed the right thing at the time,
to keep pressing record, to tempt out tunes
you only appreciated as halves in a fishpond memory
you had willingly drained, to wait the several phrases
before your fingers found their feet, to push,
to remember myself a childhood spent bouncing
on your foot under the pretence of making you stop.

But listening back, the tracks are mostly talking
and the beginnings are missing. And the tinny tunes
don’t convey the mythology of it, the smiling
recollection of it, the fairy lights and dark curtains
that turned everything cosy, the journey
we were all taking with you, the absences
that have since come clear.