[Don’t think I didn’t think it]
Don’t think I didn’t think it
running down streetlamp-lit streets,
skinny jeans, razorburn between my
ribs and the phone between my fingers,
digital clock tick-tocking six hours
until you needed to be up.
Don’t think I didn’t think it
when we danced an Ode to Walt Whitman
among the blue collar bacchants
and I recycled the shouty, strobe-light words:
‘you light up my life like nobody else’
and everyone else in the room could see it.
Don’t think I didn’t think it
with stars dripping all over
me as I read the electronic ‘goodnight’s,
with lunch
a lump
in my paper stomach, with no missed calls,
with the bus stressing all over
me as I read the SMS ‘goodmorning’s.
Don’t think
I don’t think
about you.
Adam Napier is a student from Newcastle who writes in any snatch of time he can find. He’s previously been published in The Cadaverine, The Delinquent and has poems upcoming in 3:AM Magazine.
I really like this poem. It’s not meant to be in any way belittling or patronising if I say that it reads as a fine instance of the kind of verse I think of as “student-experience poetry”, which has been with us for 40, 50 years, in a way stating the ever-repeating things about emotion, integrity and feeling – simple, important things.