We never lived in a city that knew how to stay still,
that held its own name for more than a breath—
it was always running ahead, slipping round corners,
whispering something half-heard in the thrum of the night bus,
disappearing just as we thought we had learned its language.
But we got the joke,
stood on the platform at Burnt Oak watching the wind lift old newspapers,
rode the train to Charing Cross just to read the names between the stations,
as if they could tell us something,
as if they could teach us how to belong.
And yet, in some other life, we might have stood still,
might have been the ones selling flowers at Columbia Road,
threading jasmine through the fingers of strangers,
or hunched behind the glass at Rye Lane,
spilling change into the hands of a boy whose mother sent him for plantain and Coke.
Might have been the ones leaning against a graffiti-stained lock-up in Shoreditch,
watching the city swallow another skyline.
Did we ever really walk these streets,
or did we just follow the ghosts that left before us?
The cigarette glow of Derek Jarman pacing the South Bank,
Orwell’s heavy-footed silence in a Hampstead lane,
Marx staring out of a Reading Room window,
watching a city that didn’t yet know him.
We never saw the Mangrove alive with light,
but we heard its echo in the rustle of last night’s Grenfell protest,
in the slow dance of steam from a polystyrene cup,
in the rhythms of languages we do not speak but somehow understand.
Fanon lives!
We might have ridden the Tube when Jah Wobble sat in the driver’s seat,
felt his bassline tremble through the escalators,
in the rattle of loose change in a busker’s case,
in the deep-breath stillness before the doors slide open—
another station, another life.
We never sat in the French House,
trading slurred philosophy with Bacon and the ghosts of the Colony Room,
but we have seen art in the way neon pools on wet cobblestones,
in the lipstick-stained rim of a glass abandoned at closing time,
in the way the city paints itself over, night after night,
a canvas that never stays blank.
Did we ever dance on the table at Ronnie Scott’s,
or was that just a fever dream,
just a trick of the gin and the soft curl of a saxophone at midnight?
Did we really scratch holes in the night,
or did we just want to?
Somewhere, a boy in a Hoops scarf hums a song his grandfather sang,
breath rising in clouds as he walks to The Loft.
Somewhere, a poet in a council flat scratches words onto a Tesco receipt,
folds it into his pocket,
takes the Central Line into tomorrow.
Somewhere, the city is still writing itself,
and we are still waiting for our names to appear in the margins.