Ground Report

     Today’s Ten People are the ex-flatmate breezing lazily in to lift a saucepan as if it is a nest-egg left to mature, now required to be invested somewhere else; the dizzy girl in the supermarket balancing breakfast biscuits on her head (cream-filled); the pensioner with unexplained mud-streaks on his trousers who walks straight through me; the brooding student shuffling by a single light on floor 8 as he decides between an evening of novello or chemistry; the streetlamp shadow that yesterday sheltered a gypsy beggar and today still curves around the remembered crimp of her waist-length hair; the embonpoint marchegiana who should call, but doesn’t, who should have told me she had a bow-jawed boyfriend before she wrote her name on my chest with laser eyes at that party, but didn’t; the sales rep in the cigarette shop cradling a mini-laptop on his shoulder as he plucks its keys with free hand, Symphony Of Tobacco Sticks in G; Malin, who is in every day yet as December’s snowfalls spray over serrated mountains seems ever a little closer; the bus driver chained to his seat by boredom and longing for a door button other than ‘OPEN’ and ‘CLOSE’; the Japanese pair with twin questions and giggles is Alessio at home hee hee oh is he at work then hee hee okay we come later hai, hee hee. And I’ll give you ten to one I was there as well, bound in the cerement of faint rain’s chill vigil.