@x is a real person.  I follow him on Twitter.

@x takes repeated photos of a single branch of railway line.

@x is travelling by tube, to “another country” as @x tweets it.

@x is unaware, but I am at a play “No Feedback” which has finished early due to audience disruption.

@x takes a photo, as I retrace my steps from theatre back to tube.

@x posts the pic to twitter. I see it on my phone as the tube doors open.  It’s labelled ‘the dream life of William Carlos Williams’.

@x is opposite me in the carriage as I sit down.

@x is short, with watery, clear blue eyes. I stare at him for longer than is polite, confused.

@x says to me ‘there is no meaning but in moments of time’.

One of us got off at Liverpool Street.

I was the man in the green tie.

day after day

always the same words

while the mystery of things

remain unresolved

and grammar dissolves into birdsong

It’s the first day of school, but you know what to expect. Dozing awake before the alarm, smiling, watching the sun fuzzing the summer’s mess through half-drawn curtains. You never did tidy your room. And it’s not until you’re at the bottom of the stairs, in your blazer, looking back, to the ‘Keep Out’ sign on your bedroom door, that you feel the unease, that something’s now lost in there, something that you never understood.

– submitted to paragraph planet

From the beginning, Grace knew what would kill her.

But she has three lines left to write.

Three lines left, to fall in love

With the thing that will kill her.

Or the idea of it.

She falls asleep.

Waits for the dream to come to her.

She returns to her childhood home.

It’s raining.

She opens the door and with a sense of horror smells the ghosts inside.

The lingering scent of childhood.

She runs away.

She wakes up.

In the sky there is a new kind of light.

She writes.

None of us have names

And our hearts are let go

Above an open sea.

She buys me whiskey, lips ruby red, hair darker than night and eyes the fathomless sea.  She tells me the story of the nightingale caught under a leopard’s gaze. She whispers that sex is a spell to save barbarity from boredom. I say, “Do we understand what this is? What we are?” She smiles, replies, “We are nightingales trying to speak to each other”. Then we fall silent.  Until one of us fucks the other.

Last year, impulsively, I bought a poem book about cities, how people interact. My favourite poem from it is “therearenoideasbutinthings”. I’d just joined Twitter and instantly decided to follow the author’s followers. In particular, @multiverse for his repeated selfies, always framed identically, but in different lights.

Last night I impulsively ran for a train. On it, I recognised @multiverse.

I sat and held eye contact for longer than was polite.

The tweeted caption under his final selfie read ‘The dream life of William Carlos Williams’.

One of us got off at Liverpool Street.

I was the man in the green tie.

That stubborn pull to sea,

whose tides reveal my younger self

or something that resembles it,

from memory, dark and brighter

and still occupying the same

boundaries of space,

even though, in my younger days,

I’d thought I’d stretch much further,

out into the estuary

and the oyster beds beyond

But now whose reach diminishes

as iron grey waves salt flesh

back into the water,

leaving nothing but erosion

and a darting iridescence

fathoming the depths

for the empty form of a song