Someone you’d travelled with –
wet eyed, beer foam-lipped,
in a reindeer onesie –
found everything you said funny.
Things he had never told anyone
chirped from his mouth like birdsong.
At the other end of a panicked call
the man in the onesie – set for a fall –
back to being a stranger
dead in your mind only six hours later.

© Carl Burkitt 2021

(Written by grabbing a paragraph from Mark Watson’s book ‘Contacts’, rearranging it to a 10 line poem, removing lines 2,4,6,8,10 and replacing them with my own.)