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 Watchtower stand,
    a man flicks through a pamphlet.
Transfixed, he targets
each word with a single digit, cigarette
        floating in his other hand.

---

First published in The London Library Magazine