City poems

1.

There was a day of
Wasps,  I remember
As I walked to work
Buzzing in the bins

A Barboured old man
with a puppy dog in
his hands, the colour
Of burnt caramel

Today will be a good day
I can tell.



2.

The man with the blue tie
  glides by
The man with the pink tie
  points his finger
    at others
The man with the dry eyes
  looks tired
And, I with the wry
smile feel removed from it all



3.

The thing about all of
these things is
I cannot be bothered.

I wrap myself up in
Cotton wool and
Dive down under the covers

Sleep til light
Then do it all over again
Five days a week
Until the Sabbath

Forgetting all of what's gone
past as I dip my
Toes in to the future

Some sort of manifesto

As I sit here on the stairs thinking to write, forcing each quaver in to my mouth for the crisp to dissolve or crunch away, I am struck with a sense of foreboding determination. I came home and I was so hungry but lacking the willpower to cook anything I ate two bowls of cereal, using up that extra carton of soya milk I bought by accident. Kill two birds? Not the right idiom. Like when I cocked my eyebrow in that way no one else can do apart from on the silver screen, at my friend across the pub table and pronounced, ‘So he’s quite the dark stallion.’ Meaning horse. As I crumple the yellow packet between my twisting fingers, I am doing sums in my head. I have exactly 9 hours I spend at work, 1 hour for lunch, which I completely waste doing nothing, 30% of which is eating. I bore myself eating my lunch, eating the same thing I have cooked every day for the past month now, too afraid to try something different in case it comes out horrible like that baltic curry I tried to muster (and from a jar). Either way that’s 9 hours gone. That leaves me 15 hours in a day. Now if I try to scrape back the equal amount of time I am not at work for myself i.e. to do waking, living things, then that would leave me 6 hours to fall asleep in. And that’s if I really squeeze everything I want to do in to my 9 hours, which has to, by nature, include things I don’t care about doing like putting out the bins, tapping in through commuter barriers, buying soya milk, etc. That’s not even including all the miscellaneous things I sort of want to/have to do in my play time, like answering WhatsApp threads and watching YouTube videos. 

So I pace it up the stairs.

I leave the cereal bowl behind me on the table - I’ll clean it up later - I open this laptop and start padding for words to appear on this screen (a lot like the screen I have to stare at for 9 hours at work), but that’s my bread, you know how people used to say wholesome things like earning your bread and butter to mean doing an honest day’s work? Yeah, well I don’t remember, but I still get the gist. Everyone’s got to make a living and I spend all day looking at brands. We don’t eat as much bread any more but we sure consume a lot of brands and that gave me a job, in the end, I’m grateful for our gastronomic capitalist habits in providing me with a wage. I feel like I’m writing some sort of manifesto, just so that I can get my head stuck back down to the thing that I want my head to be stuck to. And that’s write.