Meeting by chance on the Elizabeth line

 

We’d met before. Somewhere out there, under the blizzard of gleaming infrastructure. Both of us, inattentive, gone overground in the wrong direction, unsure what we’d find at the end of the line. But staying on board simply to see how cold it was. We shared a curry on a dingy street of older houses, one of the few low-rise options left. All that pent-up memory under brutal walkways. We talked like two faulty taps: our words either gushing in torrents or reluctant as a trickle. She spoke about ‘colour prejudice’ in the way my mother would have. Owning no parallel backstory, I frowned; left to question my own false footsteps.

 

biting wind, warm spice

run-off stains the concrete slabs

unhealed wounds surface

 

v. 2026

In the room that isn’t there

 

When Solomon asked for wisdom, he made a big mistake. God told us so as he left for lunch, but the warning fell on our cloth ears. Minds brimful of beeswax, stolen nectar on our fingers.

 

We were discussing how, by hand unseen, a creature could be rendered into some other form. I asked whether you perceived a touch of Ovid in me. You said there were no black sheep. Not In this family.

 

The brother phoned. He wanted to know how the piglets were keeping. There were ten in our yard out back – we took them on leads for a daily walk. Five each. Plentiful squealing.

 

After that incident with the Palace security guards, you put on roller skates. To keep up, I was Billy Whizz. Didn’t want to be interviewed on Newsnight about those gnomes on the windowsill

 

who rubberneck through half-closed shutters, shine moonbeams on our darkened heartland. Its staircase garrotted with bunting. In a milk jug on the table, poppies the size of dinner plates.

 

 iii. 2026

Signing off

fridge poem for May Day 26

 

Avoiding the question

 

You ask what’s in this place we chose

which keeps us here, to close our days.

I cannot answer that for last year’s blooms remain

to be deadheaded.

                                  Their dry and brittle seedpods

clipped and swept aside, like so much futile beauty.

 

Rather, I would be a grebe. Lose my hobbled gait,

float on some still clear broad.

                                                        Stay low.

Dive to the bottom where even now light reaches.

While held breath holds, lobed toes propel

my dagger bill, emerging elsewhere faraway.

 

And long ago on disused track, its sleepers gone,

a skinny boy quickens to the cross-country tape.

Muddy pumps scrunch on old ballast

past the sewage farm.

                                         Not yet overwhelmed

by heavier rain, cracked pipes, and more of us.

  

iii. 2026