Love on a Monday Evening
by and published in Edition Two of Pomegranate
after Neruda
Today I felt fear and it was the grandest thing –
like the crown of my head would lift off.
Not a leaf could have flipped on its back in the wind
that I wouldn’t have noticed.
An Arab sat opposite me on the train.
I had taken the first carriage,
the one we had imbued with likely death
in a way we can only substantiate for each other.
My fingers filled with static and my blood turned
to white noise. I could describe him for you,
a quick photo-fit sketch, but mostly it was his stubble
and the wart on his left cheek,
like in news reports. I have a spot in the same place
on my right cheek. You’ve never called me
a terrorist when I’ve not shaved for that long. Mostly
I have been supporting myself on wire link fences
looking at each partition of waste land,
square by square, until the police move me on.
George Ttoouli
George Ttoouli is 28 years old. He works in London as the Education Projects Co-ordinator at the Poetry Society and in Coventry as an Honorary Teaching Fellow for the Warwick Writing Programme. As a freelancer he edits British Pensioner and co-edits Gists and Piths and The Oubliette. He received a Jerwood-Arvon Young Writing Apprenticeship in 2004 and was commended for creative non-fiction in 2007 by New Writing Ventures. He is fairly convinced that he shouldn’t be writing poetry, but he just can’t stop.