Jamie Cameron

When we fall asleep

After Michael Donaghy

we share, without knowing,

the same dream.

In it clouds clear

beneath our feet to reveal

a town’s set geometries, 

the same motifs repeating

all the way to the sea, 

where a group of islands

stretches out like the small bones 

of the hands and feet.

We hang there for hours,

looking down on the barren

tops of buildings, green space, 

gridlock, bridges.

And maybe it is this 

analogue silence —

the hush of your nervous system

like something tuning in,

the white noise

of each other’s breathing —

that brings to mind 

each private dread

and secret hurt. 

It might not even be yours.

Or do I just imagine 

you said that?

When we wake I press

my ear against your chest —

a prisoner at a wall — to hear 

one beat. No. Two beats fall.

Jamie Cameron was born in Swansea, Wales and grew up in the East Midlands. His poetry has been published in journals including Anthropocene, Wet Grain, The High Window and Broken Sleep’s Masculinity: An Anthology of Modern Voices. He is the Managing Editor of The London Magazine.

Jamie wrote the following about his poem:

Like many poets, I have a tendency to become obsessed. Over the past ten years, I’ve continually read and re-read everything Michael Donaghy wrote. This poem takes two of his lines and reworks them into something new. Inevitably, it contains some of his signature obsessions—dreams, white noise, analogue technology—but I hope the alchemical payoff is my own.