Rest Assured
You won’t be there tonight
sagged upon the stool of an emptying bar
the same corner where you and Frank
used to sit as weekends blurred by.
Nor will you stumble into a club after hours
to mumble your age, name and how
this isn’t your kind of place to the bodies
that shift in and out of view.
Tonight, you will nurse your can rested on
an armchair then take your thirty minutes
under the streetlights and a clear night sky
just as on your own as everyone else.
Michael Burton is from Bacup in East Lancashire but is currently living in Beijing and has been for several years. So far in 2020, his work has been published in Runciple Spoon, Allegro and Nine Muses Poetry in the UK and in The Spittoon Collective in China.