Spinning out
She sees but doesn’t
as she spins her coffee out.
Behind her, morning squishes wide
against the station buffet.
Train liveries drape across their line of travel,
suffer the shunt and wheeze of doors
and half-tumbled bodies.
Flecks of coat, profiles, case-wheels
play into the platform’s rolling wave.
Beside her a jackpot machine
works through its scraggly repertoire
of come-hither tunes. A silver-hinged case
with man attached wallows up at a nearby table.
She tilts her cup higher.
The man asks if she’s finished with the paper
she hasn’t read. She twitches be my guest.
Her eyes don’t move.
She’s off to meet a maybe beau coughed up on the web.
She has to be at an upstairs conference room
full of tumblers and iffy pens
where side-roads wear wisps of country.
She’s spending time with a uni daughter
caught on the spikes between childhood and all to come.
She’s visiting mum and dad after an estrangement
that began when someone said or didn’t say
in some time-shrouded moment.
There’s no local bed available – the best they can do
is a clinic she can’t picture
far over a hill of strange parishes.
The silver-hinged case hauls its man away.
He drops the paper in front of her
with half a thanks. Her eyes don’t move.
She finishes her coffee. Of a sudden
she checks her watch, pats her pockets
as if she’d forgotten she was with herself,
re-fusses the scarf at her throat
to stymie the world’s consternation.
Arranges herself round her deepest breath.
Leaves to the sound of a ringtone
trilling Someone To Watch Over Me.
Michael W. Thomas’s latest poetry collection is Under Smoky Light (Offa’s Press). His work has appeared in The Antioch Review (US), Critical Survey, Irish Studies Review, Magazine Six (US), the TLS and Under the Radar, among others. www.michaelwthomas.co.uk