There’s light and joy, but there’s also darkness all around and we can be lost in it.

I was born in a hovel on the banks of the Tyne, as so many of us were back then.

The body is soft, beautiful, vulnerable. It’s easy to threaten it. It’s easy to harm it. It takes next to nothing to cause pain, to draw blood, to break bones. Takes next to nothing to blast a body to bits. It’s much harder to protect it, she says, and much more important.

Death is hungry and Destruction is determined and it does not like its intended victims to get away.

Follow me, one word then another, one sentence then another, one death then another. Don’t hesitate. Keep moving forward with me through the night. It won’t take long. Don’t look back.

Maybe poets get to you best when you’re sort of dreaming, when you’re hardly there at all.

It happened so long ago I can’t even be sure it happened as I say it did. Stories change in the telling, memory makes up as much as it knows. We were very small. The things we saw were all mixed up with the things we dreamed and the things we were scared of.

They think schools stop you from learning,′ I said. ‘They think schools try to make everybody just the same.

There’s nowt to know. A miserable caulker. But you, you’re different, and you’ll be grown and gone afore I know.” He stared from the window. Sleet splashed down onto the pebbledash outside. “And this is hardly a place that’ll draw you back,” he said.

I love the night. Anything seems possible at night when the rest of the world has gone to sleep. It’s dark and silent in the house, but if I listen close, I hear the beat beat beat of my heart. I hear the creak and crack of the house. I hear my mum breathing gently in her sleep in the room next door.