The Visitor
by and published in Edition Eleven of Pomegranate
Mr Mandelbrot, sitting, beside a stranger on the tube
Whose daughter’s waiting for a bus
Next to a man who’s hardly moved
Because he’s thinking of his wife
Who’s lying naked on a beach
Next to a man she hardly knows
(But only charges ten pounds each)
Reads through the paper.
He thinks ‘I wouldn’t vote for him,’
As all the lights flick on and off
So everybody loses place
In all their books and someone coughs
Next to a man who turns away
And tries to breathe the cleaner air
Although he finds his head is buried
In a stranger woman’s hair,
‘I’m voting Labour’.
They all come groping from the tunnel
Into light, into their senses,
Into back-yard dogs and trampolines
And bicycles and fences.
Watching closely in his mid-range
Factory-outlet pin-stripe navy suit
Thinks Mandelbrot ‘I know it’s hard,
I live your life, I know the truth’.
Gets off at Kensington.