Your thanks are welcomed every time

by Chris Hopkins / April 2nd, 2017

I sat in their chairs like stains on the fabric,
measuring a life gone,
counting the refresh rate on a VDU.
Monitoring the toner.
Charged with cartridge orders.

I am a King.
Your thanks are welcomed every time.

The staircase climb,
felt no different this morning,
though I realised those desk top lunches
leave their trails on the seagrass grey.
And that’s what I took with me.

23 years.
After biting down every day,
every wish of time to go, until the
rush hour slug or holiday time hospice relief,
it’s the remains of lunchtimes,
droppings of white collars,
left on the carpet tiles.
I died on the floor thinking what lunches fitted the wheeled in crumbs,
like a librarian of waste.

Chris Hopkins, was born and raised in Neath South Wales, surrounded by machines and mountains, until he moved to Oxford in his early twenties. He currently resides in Canterbury and works for the NHS. Chris, who claims poetry has been "my ladder out of some dark places" has had poems published in Tuck Magazine, the online literary journal 1947, Transcendent Zero Press and Duane's PoeTree. Two of his early e-book pamphlets "Imagination is my Gun" and "Exit From a Moving Car" are available on Amazon. Read other articles by Chris.

This article was posted on Sunday, April 2nd, 2017 at 8:02am and is filed under Poetry.