I’m in the mood to listen, and so he moves his head closer
to mine, and he’s an artist,
and he’s telling me that there’s no such thing
as bad light, and that robots can never
be artists, on account of the need for a soul, but he’s also
a poet, and he says that all poetry
is war poetry, and I’m certain
that a moment ago, he also said
that all desire is really mourning, so he must be
a philosopher too, and I’ll go along
with all of his generalisations, because I’ll never be held
to them, and because my body
is the Earth, rotating on its axis and travelling around the sun
at the same time, while my head is now
an attic, where only a few shafts of light cut in
around the shutters, picking out the scratches
and grease stains on the floorboards,
and I don’t care what he says,
this light is bad.
Mary Ford Neal is a writer and academic living and working in the West of Scotland. Her first collection, ‘Dawning’ (Indigo Dreams) was published in August 2021, and her poetry is widely published in magazines and anthologies. She is assistant editor of Nine Pens Press and ‘192’ magazine. Twitter: @maryfordneal