Greggs has run out of coffee beans.
    Hey, no one’s complaining.
There’s a handwritten note explaining.
I try the Café Nero (it’s raining)
        and work on a series of screens.

This could be any European city
    if it weren’t for the statues: Victoria, Albert,
Robert Peel, William Ewart
Gladstone. We’re a country apart.
        I wonder that you miss me.

Outside, near the Jehovah's Witness stand,
    a man is flicking through a pamphlet.
Transfixed, he targets
each word with a single digit, cigarette
        floating in his other hand.

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First published in The London Library Magazine