By Adam Colclough
I never noticed the space
you held
until it filled up with wilting flowers,
buying off our shame
at always having somewhere
else to go,
Never finding time to stop
and look
for another face in yours,
one creased into a map
of hell
by a life of bad luck,
The slow, cruel twist of hard
times turned
into time measured out
behind doors,
each one slamming louder
than the last,
Looking at this shrine
to a life lost before it ended,
I think of the worlds separating
us
Mine shaped by righteous
anger
at suffering I can’t understand
will turn again tomorrow,
while yours, mauled by bitter
experience; will not.
I wrote this poem in early 2023. At the time I was a part-time student at Staffordshire University, and on my way to the library used to walk past the entrance to Stoke station. There often used to be a homeless man lying wrapped in a sleeping bag by one of the pillars. Then one day he wasn’t there, and someone had left a single bunch of those cheap flowers you buy at service stations in his place.
The poem examines what might have led to someone ending up in such a situation, how the doors offering opportunities to escape closed one after another, each one slamming louder than the last. It also looks at the helplessness you feel seeing someone suffer in a way nothing in your own experience equips you to understand.
It is, I suppose, a political poem, but not one that tries to hand down off-the-peg solutions. Like much of my work it has its origins in something, maybe a seemingly inconsequential thing, that I may have seen or experienced that connects to something larger.
Adam is a graduate of Staffordshire University.
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