This was written to go along to horrorshock666's animation 'The Little Red Balloon'; in context, with me reading it, it is here: http://www.hitrecord.org/records/61945
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Seventeen weeks unborn
is enough
to learn to dream.

I slept soundly,
soundlessly,
undeveloped eyes
yet to open, shut tight

in the warmth and blankness
of my first home, of my
mother’s womb, me
the peaceful centre.

I was woken and ejected.
I cried at the open space, at
the antiseptic light. Outside,

I grew and shrank with
every breath, each lungful
of the external air fresh,
indifferent. I was

separate, now a boy
with blutack eyes, new. I’d lost
the protection of a loving shell,

the safety of an internal embrace,

and now the closest I can come
to feeling so softly enclosed again
is my duvet, my bed, my sleep.

So I wrap myself up, and dream
the comfort back, a still, balmy darkness,
a thick summer night. I dream. I dream
a newborn moon over dull
newbuilt houses

and a tied balloon, weightless
as driftwood, red as a warm heart.
And I untie it, hold on tight

to the string, a cord
to pull me up so
I can float towards
the moon, round and pregnant

in the inner eyelid sky. I can float.
I can float. I can float over the roofs
and over the trees, above

the tiny toy world of patchwork
fields and boardgame roads,
and break through the clouds

like candyfloss or cotton wool,
soft and sweet

and light as friendly ghosts.
The mindful tide like a sea returns
me to my mother, and

we stretch together, to each other,
though our hands can never touch,
will never grasp
in a road crossing or
a parent-swung liftoff.

And we reach and reach until
the balloon bursts, amniotic,
and my grown weight reappears,
and remembers

its downward obligation. In a
wingless tumble I spin through
the space, back down, round
and round, to the curled
foetal town, to the mattress,
the bed in my room and

the detaching daylight
of a grey orphaned morning

or into another dreamless sleep.