I don’t know how to let go Simon Maddrell

Simon Maddrell

I don’t know how to let go

Twenty years cooking a hotpot grow your own onions, potatoes father told me in Brentford they made those nylon bed sheets but not now it’s Brompton Bikes making it easier to get where and what you want, no-one knows you until we remember

that moving is no escape unless it involves all the roots getting our nails filled with its soil. I scraped most of it out though an orphan still remains in Bermondsey, but not really it’s Bermondsey Street you see

the argument is not what the argument is about my mother told me this over & again in a different way I was drawn to Stepney for four weeks in a bedsit nearby where she was born, the hospital rebuilding itself with an old facade

as if longing for her backwards nine months in Hackney where I also curled in a womb as though squatting in Broadway Market rent pouring from my pants like I am the gentry pissing my soul over the homeless

people battle every day with their lives, me with my own change put in their hand never in cups, speaking their names out loud just made it worse, for me

‘I don’t know how to let go’ continued page 1 of 2

‘I don’t know how to let go’ continued, new stanza, page 2 of 2

in Shoreditch Triangle it’s easy to be lost like having no home to go back to mother’s story it’s easy to escape in Brick Lane nostalgia like knowing there’s no going back father said but in a different way in my arms just before the end. Memories of holding on the need to let things go

to Brighton, naturally I tried Kemptown, obviously they both loved wordplay my parents, evidently Hove, actually is how I reach the sea.