Poem 3 - Whatever you've come here to get...

I'll be busy tomorrow, so here's the third draft poem for Matthew Sweeney's Guardian Unlimited workshop, which I've written in advance (this line was the one that first grabbed me):



Whatever you’ve come here to get
you’ll not find it in the slow turn and
reflect of the moon’s gunshot wound,

in the maplewood glow of the streets
after hours of trance, dripping with sweat,
when you try and pick me out from a crowd
pouring towards minicabs and kebab meat,

tired and sallow-faced and sparking up
in the flickering omnipresence of traffic lights.
You’ll not glimpse me making my way back home,

either, dragging the sack of myself to the front door
where, as the old gag goes, I piss gloriously against it
before pulling the keys out and opening up. Unseen,
and you’ll not even spot me as the last to leave,

led slowly out by the bouncers like a victim,
but just in desperate need of sleep. I won’t be
anywhere you might think, in fact, as you lie

in bed in the morning’s first light: catching a train
as the clocks strike midnight, so far from you now
and I sit, feet like tower blocks on the opposite seat,
the windows’ blur shrouding where land and sky meet.