Lament Here now, it’s hard to believe this place – yellowed wallpaper, towels hung over every decent lager except the guest – is where we first met and that blur of brilliance – a world from this pint and the torn fabric of a duff pool table – meant the next week, the next fortnight, were the closest things ever get to simple. So if this is how I know us, want us – the two who clicked on an understanding of close as close to sparseness, bluntness – then that’s why, aware or drifting, I’ve come to sit in this selfsame chair, selfsame spot; listening to the traffic which you must be a part of, somewhere, pitched as it is among frantic and Orphic while one by one the pigeons flutter off; draining the glass and closing my book as the lights click on, someone coughs, and the place is good as lost, however I look. Ben Wilkinson
poet | critic | writer