Because when you watch the woman
sitting next to you writing an e-mail
in what looks like Korean, or find yourself
asking
someone called Candy from Saskatchewan
for two bagels with cream-cheese,
it occasionally still hits you; how it’s
like the blink of an eyelid since, down this street,
the coffee was rotten, and a night out
just a pint of sad Smithwicks eventually
emerging in a withered hand
from a back-street hatch, a barman telling
a complaining Yank how the lock broken
on that toilet door has been that way
for nearly twenty years, and not
a single shit stolen yet.
