It’s my birthday today!
so what can I say
of course I Googled which celebrity
happened to share the same nativity

Mekhi Phifer
Charles Goodyear
Elizabeth of Russia
Madame de Pompadour
Bernard Cribbins
Jennifer Ehle
Ted Danson
Jude Law

and then I thought about a guy
I met one night
on an emergency call
he’d fallen
down some steps
suffered a complex
fracture of the right medial malleolus
luckily he still had his phone so he could call us
he was horribly drunk
in a flop sweat funk
he said his wife had walked out
at the end of her tether no doubt
so he’d gone on a bender
then went back round there
to sing to her out on the pavement
and tripped down four steps into the basement

‘Hey!’ I said
when he was lying strapped up on the ambulance bed
and I was writing up his past medical history
‘we share the same birthday!’
he gave me a look
like what the fuck
you’ve got to be joking
and more to the point, the pain meds aren’t working