Eclipse

I saw the eclipse and thought of you.

Or rather, I did not see it as they said

It can be much more dangerous to look

When the fullest glow seems obscured.

Of course, the alternative was no better.

The shadows shifting—slightest chill.

A pale imitation of a summer evening.

Then seeing the disappearance echo

Through the cracks in a shelf of leaves,

Or repeating in the one hundred holes

Of a next-door neighbour’s colander.

But if I found you in the eclipsing, well,

You were there in the sun’s waxing, too.

A longing borne from such brief absences,

A second’s appreciation, way past due.

Stairs

Tripped—missed a step there

On the stairs at my childhood home.

I swear that, once, I could do it

Both ways with my eyes closed

Because I knew the rhythm so well.

Could hum you the note, repeating:

The dum dum dum dum dum of feet—

Mine—drumming on the carpet.

Now the tune has changed, all tentative,

As I look down, my hand on the rail,

Trying to match my stride with the memory.

Vandalism

Did you know that Charlotte Bronte’s husband

Tried to have her correspondence burned?

Shielding the hungry eyes of the future

Like a father shields their child’s from the sun.

Well, history remembers him as a would-be vandal,

Stopped from dimming that essential light.

This is why I find myself going broke,

Paying out increasingly obscene amounts

For those extra terabytes of iCloud storage

So that I might keep all ten years of our texts—

All the offhand photos they’ll come to call ephemera—

Lest even the smallest piece of you be lost to posterity,

And they forget the story of humanity’s finest work.

glasses

That Specsavers is all a big scam, you know.

Not just because when they claim I’m short-sighted,

I detect a double meaning, and I swear last time the letters

Spelt out “P-R-I-C-K”— albeit split across three lines of the chart.

It’s not even the casual reminders that my eyes,

Like everything, will keep on getting weaker by the day.

It’s just that recently I’ve left the house glasses-less

So that I might soften the sharpest edges of the world.

I spotted our long-departed border collie, in the dim shape

Of a neighbour’s labrador, just far enough away— and

Where the grass bleeds between the bare tree branches

Looked something like the leaves of our last summer.

And I’d rather take another thousand split seconds

Of you, rendered in the blurry face of a stranger,

Than lose my hope to a so-called “corrective” lens.

Seasonal Vacancy

Seeking old acquaintance,

Brought to mind in the local,

On a roughly five-minute contract.

Hometown applicants only.

Mutual year eight lessons essential.

Spending Christmas back home,

Instead of in an otherwise empty

London house share, desirable.

Effective three pint communication.

Detail oriented: such as recalling

Recent insta stories of city breaks

To ease the occasional silences.

Has experience managing priorities,

Like balancing really needing to get back

To your mates with basking, for another

Few seconds, in the dying light of the past.

A bachelors degree in yearning for a time

That likely never existed or, at least, is lost—

Or other relevant practical experience.

Reports to: the old group chat. Though

Usually distracted by external stakeholders,

Has more bandwidth this time of the year,

Hearing murmurs of do you remember him?

Twenty-eight

I’ve been complaining a bit,

About turning twenty-eight.

But I don’t think I mean it.

You’d never start moaning at

The world’s best restaurant

Because you can’t order

What you had before, though

The next-door table gets

To enjoy it for the first time.

Or sigh, when you hit the slower

Middle chapters of a book

That changed your life.

Would you stifle your celebration

Of the third goal, in an eight-nil

Thrashing of your local rivals,

Just because you’re more partial

To a long-range screamer

Than the bicycle kick you just saw?

I wouldn’t break to rub a hamstring,

With only a whisper of soreness,

If I’m on the most beautiful walk

I could ever take— as though

Something might stop me going on.

modern problems #10

I missed the aurora borealis again,

but I don’t mind all that much.

I would rather not muse about

how small I am

when all I care to know is so small.

And I don’t have time to be reminded

that I’m at the whim of the sun

by a brief skyful of miracle

blown in on a light solar wind.

That’s why I was inside, texting you

that we’ll see each other another time

and we both revelled in the lie

that we might have a say in the matter

as the light beat against the blinds.

Modern problem #9

I lost all my lives on Duolingo,

Conjugating the French verbs wrong.

It’s not that I don’t get the rules, but

Why would I make that cruel past tense

With ‘to love’ or ‘to know’ or ‘to be’

When I’m barely through with the present?

And besides, I kind of like this little world—

Bound by the few adjectives I know—

Where everything and everyone is,

By necessity, amusant or plus gentil or

Très, très bien.

modern problems #8

no need for the quid, destined for the cake sale tin;

there’s a PayPal link in the all staff email— fees apply.

and that leaving card is online, too, so keep your biro.

there’s a whole bunch of hole punches gathering dust

you can put it with, just next to the gunless staples.

dump printers and telephones, before patience ends

on skin and bones, the most unoptimised of machines.

all these cables lead to nowhere, you know; they’re all

VGA in the age of HDMI. hanging on like the old USB.

first they came for the PC towers and I said nothing,

because I found my laptop largely more convenient,

but now I’ve never had so many places to dock while

feeling so unmoored. and the desks are so bloody hot

that no one can bear to sit at them.

so I’ll never believe the lies spread by big ergonomics

about why eyes sting in the unnatural, overhead light.

the end of summer

and when the rain came,

which we knew it would,

we didn’t mind too much.

because what rose from

the tarmac was the smell

of those last days of summer;

like a breath—sweet and cool—

from the depths of the shortest

nights,

when we’d almost forgotten

the tired, midday heat.