jamesnewbery20James Newbery 2.6 Challenge: Writing a 26 line poem!
Pavement encounters
Those brief few minutes
A highlight of the day.
Random, bumping into an old school friend
The middle of the street
Purely by chance
One crush after another
Within the space of thirty seconds
Two people who have occupied your thoughts for so long
Years even
Yet have no knowledge of how often
Their names have rolled around inside your head.
‘Love in the Time of Coronavirus’
The inevitable names of endless fringe shows
Performed next year
The title selected for its self gratifying irony
— there isn’t any.
But as if there was before
Those two faces
Melting
Into the Thames without a single
Thought of what they mean to you.
You want to touch them, but you can’t
This time restrained not by paralysing social anxiety
But the fact that a singular handshake
Is now deemed contact too far.