Noisy Lady

A noisy lady (heels
clash, spangles splash)
stamps inside an evening
train just before the doors
swish closed and we flash
through franchise suburbias
burst straight out of Television

("These places are
all plug-and-play!"
I’d heard a man once say,
and remind myself I am breathing,
breathing clouds of drifting gases,
all of us drawing them in
and releasing them again

and again) and now the noisy
lady sits silently beside a man
with a steel brush crew cut
and a jacket advertising a bank,

his creased brown glamourless face
beside her immaculate mask
whose pale eyes stare hard at a dream
of a place where the wind won’t reach us

and our breath is not a trumpet
blowing heartbreak in a ragged old world.



.