Poems On the Underground

In the exaggerated moment,
the long blink between reading
and re-reading and memorising
the adverts above your head,
I pretend I do not notice
the cobwebs on your thighs
and the glimpse of next-week’s washing.

I realise you are using
your i-pad as a make-up mirror,
zooming the webcam to check for spots
- and you are oblivious
to the message you are sending:
steal me! steal me!
from this airhead girlie without a clue.

I have written as well as read
Poems on the Underground, whole pages
of spider-scrawl in my notebook,
recording more of the sway and lurch
of the tunnel network than
the inter-connecting stations of my thoughts,
all sliding doors and ‘mind the gap’.

Most days, I doze into a Metro
and half-dream a delirium of news,
a reportage of subconscious rubbish
- and wonder if I snore or drool,
or rest my head on my neighbour’s shoulder,
until the darkness lifts and I blink
in the light two stops past my own.

Yet I am kept awake by my fascination
for you: a woman younger than my daughter,
whose coquettish glances
over the rim of your hand-held screen
are surely not meant for me,
except as a ‘what the fuck you looking at?’
warning – dream on, granddad…

Dream on, I do: the prickle
of my gaze is not a barb of lust,
unfocused as it is
and unwilling to snag the patterned denier
that masks the smoothness of your skin
and describes the tracery of veins
that highlights the sags and wrinkles of mine.

And when you stow your i-pad in a pocket
of your ‘Hello Kitty’ back-pack
and rise from your seat in a lissome swirl
around the hand-rail, like a pole-dancer
executing a bored and automatic move,
you smile and make eye-contact,
as if age is a conspiracy in which we share.