This poem doesn't have a title because it's taken from a sequence of poems called "Book of Matches." And I got the idea from a party game that we used to play. You hand around a box or a book of matches, everybody gets one match, and in turn you strike the match. And then you have to tell the story of your life before the match goes out. And I've always been really interested when we played that game, what people will blurt out about their lives, you know, under the pressure of the heat of the match, but also under the pressure of making disclosures in front of complete strangers. So this poem represents kind of somebody making a confession to themselves about themselves. And it describes leaving home, you know, which for a lot of people is a very important occasion. It was a bit of a sort of anti-climax for me. I only got about six doors down the road to a rented house, about a quarter of a mile from here actually. And my mom came along to help me measure up for carpets and curtains. And she'd brought with her a tape measure, which in the poem becomes a kind of umbilical cord, measuring the distance between us as I'm about to leap off into the rest of my life. "Mother, any distance greater than a single span requires a second pair of hands. You come to help me measure windows, helmets, doors, the acres of the walls, the prairies of the floors. You at the zero end, me with a spool of tape, recording length, reporting metres, centimetres back to base, then leaving up the stairs, the line still feeding out, unreeling years between us. Anchor, kite, a space walk through the empty bedrooms, climb the ladder to the loft to breaking point where something has to give. Two floors below your fingertips still pinch the last 100th of an inch. I reach towards a hatch that opens on an endless sky to fall or fly.".