The Photograph

Just Around The Corner From The Queens

Riding through tunnels
interwoven like veins,
carrying life.
underground, he came
to soak up the city.
to revel in its glorious filth,
until dusk trades for dawn
and all of its brutal revelations.
in last nights suit, he stands
nursing his anti-climax.
sooty lashes
dust porcelain white skin,
translucent in places,
sunken eyes the past has painted
on shadows of purple black
and bluey-grey’s, with an artists eye.
ruby lips that kissed too long,
bitten, bruised, and swollen.
whispery whites of spiralling breath.
steel silvers and oil-spill rainbows,
leaf clogged gutters yellows and green,
and there he stood beneath nature,
as wrong in the picture as the tree, itself.
the faint almost-there grey
smoke, curling from your lip;
eyes: vacant, elsewhere.
the stench of the Thames,
the early morning air
knotting his stomach,
chilling his throat.
gazing down absently,
toe of his shoe
scuffing empty cigarette packets…
the hiss of a bus
spewing diesel toxicity,
halting, doors flung open,
offering a way out.
faces spill off
in dozens
each ignoring the next.
taking with them
umbrellas and briefcases,
leaving nothing
except his vacancy.
expressions: fixed and keen,
sedated and souless,
purposefully marching
around his bubble,

Monday morning, in London.

Lucy 2007