night-walking in Exeter 📕
poem 3/10 from warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021)
CN: suicide
night-walking in Exeter
some nights I’d walk myself alive. let the street decide. I came this close.
(dull halo of a megabus down a dual carriageway)
tried to let go of the railings. lips grazing a lorry. you should. I couldn’t.
(cold wind clicking on a crane’s metal cage)
thought I’d slip into the river. rip this letter I up. but my tongue became a torch.
(blue discus of an ambulance hurtling through the dark)
push your ear to the breath of it. resuscitate a reason.
[💽 AUDIO COMING]
Previously published in StepAway Magazine (2021).
Shaun Hill (born 1996) is a poet, somatic educator, and working-class survivor of decades of multi-agency failings, living in the British Midlands. He’s the author of warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021), A Mushroom Wastes Nothing (Substack, 2026) and the developer of Loop & Line: Experiments in Physical Thinking.
He’s over 40 poems into his second full-length collection, And Now The Body Speaks. He writes for the voices who will dance medicine twenty years from now: a taproot decompacting the soil of the unspeakable.