Stay a while longer

Why are you here?

Did you expect my words to be your pain

painted on walls in this industrial town? 

Like Bansky but cheap?

I’m not that good, but stay with me for a while. 

Have you sat on the verge for so long

you halfway live on the other side by now?

Do you no longer recall the smell of the sea, 

but you dream of it at times, 

when the static in your head has you tuning out

and you watch the world through glass, 

waiting maybe for a ride 

into the vast colourless distance 

beneath unending colourless skies. 

Are you shivering? 

Do you leave the radio on at night?

We’re both sleeping on train rails

in the days after Christmas, so let me hold your hand.

I’m not good at it, but your fingers are cold,

and so are mine.

Do you feel a draught in every room

from the place that is now empty

to the fissure in your heart, 

where the haze is seeping in?

I know about the days when the world slips out of grasp

and your body cannot move, 

and you crouch down on the ground. 

I will sit there with you. 

Simple.

I don’t know your name, 

but I’ve forgotten mine along the way anyhow. 

Maybe we’ll find new names one day, 

or we’ll find our old ones, 

primal, as they were

before ballpoint pens wrote them down

in the annals of this sordid establishment.

What I’m saying is

At times we both dangle our feet over the abyss. 

But take my hand, or better yet 

I’ll take yours, 

and we’ll stay here a while longer.

I hear there’s a bakery if you walk the other way. 

It’s not much but 

there’s a lonely cat along the road, 

and the smell of bread is filling, 

and the old lady knows stories 

about the fisherfolk and the sea, 

and she’ll make tea, 

basil and thyme, 

likely a bit bitter 

and a bit warming all the same, 

and we can stay there for another while.