November
What leaves are left
are mustard, maroon, wax-jacket green
make pavements slippery as wet cardboard.
Sunlight makes the fields steam
or works like long exposure.
I think about a hospital
and frosted glass
in single-glazing window panes.
Somewhere
rainwater drips in an abandoned school.
Yes, here
the year is ending
like something no one has the heart to say.
Conkers
Take the green flail head,
press the spikes into your palm,
find the curve, the cleft.
*
Wedge in both your thumbs,
ease it gently till it cracks:
your chestnut’s oyster.
*
Now, feel greasy skin
like a drop of wooden oil
that’s hard in your hand.
*
Think a horse’s coat.
Think of anything at all.
Think a polished floor.
*
Or, instead, recall
a sock that’s full to bursting:
that black eye, that bruise.
Pardal
I wake under a simple cotton sheet
and listen to the bougainvillea.
Through the open window
the heat’s approaching through els camps
like a heavy goods train
but at least for now
the bedsheet’s cool and smooth
around my thighs
the flowers beneath the plastic windowsill
are a deep, scented, paso-doble pink.
And there’s nothing to do but yawn and stretch
and savour knowing
you must be no more than a room away
as a sparrow whips across the rooftops
like a skimming stone.
Ex
Mostly, I feel the truth. We only get one time around.
But then, sometimes, I’m still climbing from a mildewed shower
in late October to stand in bulging clouds of steam.
My flat mates yell encouragement as I step
into the evening’s orange dark. In the courtyard
there’s the cymbal-clash of a football kicked against a fence.
Out on the street, there’s the low bass-chorus of a million cars,
then the sirens, the sooty engine-throb of a bus,
a carful of hip-hop gliding slowly to the traffic lights.
There’s the neon sign over the newsagent’s,
the Tesco Metro lit up like a West End stage.
And as I walk, laughter detonates in pubs, there are
the rows of ladies in their multi-coloured saris.
And that’s when I end up outside the Overground,
where I hang back and check my phone.
Then when the train arrives, I stand on tiptoe,
trying to make out your small blonde head
among the other passengers. And I don’t know or else
don’t realise that in some ways I will always be here.
*
William Thompson is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Bristol. Born in Cambridgeshire in 1991, his poems have appeared in Poetry Wales, Poetry Birmingham, Wild Court, Acumen and elsewhere. His debut pamphlet After Clare (2022) is published by New Walk Editions.
New Critique 