Our parents walked us over

Six-hundred-and-thirty miles

Of rockpools and beach huts

From Minehead to Poole

And I'm endlessly nostalgic

For all those negligable coves

That we hadn't the time to explore

And I don't know if you feel it too

But when I think of Cornwall

My lungs seem to be hungry

For an ocean that would swallow me whole

Without noticing

Because part of me got marooned

In the Cornish sea that we skipped over

And my toes long for the flat warmth

Of the pebbles that shredded my feet

And tears sit behind my eyelids

And itch like sand

Because I want to hear the call in a seashell

As it blows my ear kisses

And lures me deep.

When we started our tour

We queued up at the start line

To pay for our tickets

And we cruised the coast

From our hiking boots

Like double-decker-busses

With open tops

And I wanted to be torn from the ground to the sky

And never fall

Back

Or place another foot forward.

Foot after foot after foot

Ate up the path

But my legs were two thirds of yours

And I was two thirds of you

So you streamed ahead

Brandishing the abundance of your infinity

I promised my fatigue

And my blisters

That I would cross the finish line first.

But when the years passed

The miles were stepped over

And the finish line arrived

I ran

And you gave chase

And my shorts were laced with sea water

That held me down and pinned me to the sand

Like an ex-lover it was fond of.

You had never trusted the sea

Never permitted it to leave its finger marks all over you

And so you broke the tape

By then I was too aged to admit

That I was breaking promises I now can never keep

And I know its stupid

But those six-hundred-and-thirty miles

That I whispered over

With my two thirds body

Feel like a waste now I know

That I will never be the one to finish them first.

You know what my favourite photograph is?

We're sat on the way-marker

That points to Zennor

And we're back to back

Siamese

Glued from coccyx to skull

And my two thirds legs hang shorter than yours

But we're touching forever

Even though we don't touch these days

By law

And I want to shed my salted heart

When I think of how my skin

Is not made up of the same cells

That once touched yours.