I have thought about changing my name, I imagine a world where I wasn’t. I think of my favourite painters and consider stealing something that belongs to them: could I be Alexander Millar?

I journey back to the Russian steppe and hope that the answer somehow will be displayed in the scene in Fiddler on the Roof where they are all leaving Anatevka and trudging with all of their belongings to the new world….I try humming ’if I were a rich man'over and over to myself imagining that some new name will appear that embraces my ancestors'longing. It doesn’t work.

The street you grew up on and your first pet. This would make me Jason Pratt. It doesn’t work.

I imagine my mother struggling with a baby name book. She is well into her ninth month, its resting on her belly, she is thinking of her off spring and dreaming of her future, I should be named after a bird she thinks. My father doesn’t agree, but maybe I should redeem her desire and call myself magpie? kingfisher? Nightingale?Woodpecker?

Names have power. Each syllable draws down an intention that is infinite, that is the rubbish that we think, so it is with great weight I make a decision to go my own way, to leave behind the baggage to sign my own script and create some of my own magic.

I need a stage name because I kissed too many boys when I was a teenager and when I write about them I don’t want them to know. I don’t want them to do internet searches and find my poems because they are bored and have a better paying job and here I am exploiting my ancestors for a bit of cheap poetry.

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