One night half cut
From too many glasses of red
You’ll go looking for the boy you left
Who loved you
As much as he loved Bob Dylan
And find him
Lurking in a dark corner of the internet
Where he belongs
And happen upon the poems he wrote
After you’d gone
Words that lay waiting
For your ghost to read them
For your voice to say their name
Poems composed in basement flats
Crowded trains
Waiting rooms
Empty parks
Poems about the places you ate and drank
And kissed and danced
Though you didn’t like to dance
Or the places you never did and never would
The room where you lay together
In that student house in New Cross
Breathing in synch
Like step-siblings
Enfolded and craving
All the other poems not yet written
Scrapped, or excised
Poems scratched into napkins
Hammered into keys
Ripped from the typewriter
Torn up and thrown away
Or bundled into carrier bags
To slowly yellow
Poems about all the half smoked cigarettes
Upended bottles of port
And burnt out ends of days
In the city when it was still liveable
And you were lucky to be there and be young and in love
However briefly
And maybe you’ll think the same of those months
As a kind of fever dream
With a narcotised, gin-soaked haze
Days of love and light
And neon nights
Drinking each other in
Before your poet became a drunk
And the words became whimsy
Or maybe you’ll think nothing about them at all
Lifting cold water in your cupped hands
Wearing your hair the same way he remembered it
Dark and long and blonde on blonde
Talking the way you used to talk
About music, books and art
Like any of it mattered
When you were both too busy
Burning a hole in the world
To notice