A burp of laughter in the boardroom
or sombre at a birthday party,
we spy each other quick as sweat.
Fitful sleep in the passenger seat?
Check. Introspective in rain like you
forgot your own name? You bet.
Here’s a gin in a whisky tumbler
to us, who sit in the theatre’s
singular dark to watch the full
credits run and beyond; who hear
the fox’s cry in the night and think
it some portent; who seriously
work away at poems, as if poems
might shape strangeness into charm,
or box the latest faux pas we’ve
played over and over and over
in the auditorium of our thoughts
this long deserted night. Day comes
just as surely as we are ourselves,
goggle-eyed and fretful by turns,
weird fish preoccupied with water.
Ben Wilkinson’s second collection “Same Difference” will be published on 28 February by Seren Books
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This article appears in the 23 Feb 2022 issue of the New Statesman, Darkness Falls