Who Are Ya

It's a challenge to your stated intention,
to force your justification into mine.
We should exist without the other,
but next week it's some other mugs
who live all over you and I both,
so we exist to each other as they and all
but yes, who are ya indeed,
coming from the next or the next to next
town over,
who are ya,
fifteen minutes ago
you could have nursed a Thermos on the coach, staring at the Hellmann's smear,
the lubricant between Hovis and cling flim, before jumping right in.

As mud clogs up my Stans from the walk across the park from the hospital border,
and its great outline reimagined, were the bricks that charcoal, its windows slit in defence, or perhaps wider, 4x3 panes of the grimed April light that first drip fed my retinas four years before my eyes gave out and the blackboard receded as did expressions, as did impressions on my periphery,
and the world crunched in to a smaller field of view-

and as the Thermos, half empty rolls off the felt seat, settles two rows back, you tuck a flare in your hat, to be let off at 0-1 (premature like, it finished 3-3) I'm well through the park now
and who are ya anyway I think looking back at the nursing homes that went up five years after mother and baby were reunited, safely sent on their way, such a shame she used to say,
such a shame I thought, folding shitty sheets in the displaced hospital laundry,
where the new roof in blue kept the seagulls honest,
(you don't shit where you eat)
that summer where I sort of kept at it,
two years after my hopes kicked back in.