Background Noise in the Aquarium
Along the carriage a range of headsets and earplugs
with bright wires, each one connected to some piece
of electronic equipment hidden beneath
the supra-epidermal layers of these creatures
who are also travelling into town at this time.
A closed loop within might be full of harmony –
anthems, perhaps, of a favourite artist or band.
Or something faintly experimental recommended
by a friend, whose tastes are more inclusive
than their own – but surprisingly accessible.
These fish can be quite gregarious in their own way,
speaking to one another over huge distances
about things which did or might or shouldn’t occur.
They use a blur of tense and place which makes them feel
at home and alone and almost completely fulfilled.
The rest of us hear one side only of these accounts,
end up being variously tantalised, bored or subdued
by events whose locations are always somewhere else.
Places we might have visited at the wrong time
or streets in suburbs we’ve only ever heard about.
Out here, we enjoy the noise of living traffic, the option
of passing the time of day with someone we can see.
Or just drifting through those intermittent silences
that are inevitably lost on the more intensely connected
of our shoal, their shimmering fins and faraway eyes.
As outsiders, we may be detached and uninitiated,
but we are joined to one another by sharing the same air.
Arriving at our destination we hear the name announced,
step lightly into a crowd whose speech is almost touch,
whose words are nearly kisses landing on our cheeks.
Oliver Comins lives and works in West London. Early work collected in a Mandeville Press pamphlet and Anvil New Poets Two. Poems are being published this year in Ink Sweat & Tears, Meniscus and The Echo Room plus The Emma Press Anthology of Fatherhood and Choclit from Happenstance.