They Come In Waves - National Poetry Day Post

Image shows Lowestoft's "Gulliver" wind turbine, wreathed in smoke from the nearby Birds Eye factory.

They Come In Waves

Heads together, slush-puppy ice-waves
Blending
With childhood-memory candyfloss,
Sending
Stereotypes of "the boy one" and "the girl one"

Saves
Of cognitive shortcuts whose codes
May not reflect reality;

Because
Whether fairground floss or dreamscape sea,

They are both, in several ways,
"The girl one."
A babe and her hun,
Holding quiche,
Taking the chiller-cabinet background to

The watermelon

They've been eyeing since they first walked in.

Tie-dye jeans tied to
Genes that have you tied
Between shafts of assumption

And expectation.

Your truth will out.
I reach up, open the door

Look back to see

you follow me;

Relieved, and a little more relaxed
Than you were before.

We both reached this point
Where the roads converged.
We each pushed past barriers,
Cut back thorns,
Ignored warning signs
To take the road less travelled -
I hope we get to talk together
About the difference that it made.

'They Come In Waves' was developed from snapshot poems - verbal photographs, designed to be written without editing, to simply capture a moment - that I wrote around encountering LGBTQ+ people in my local town.

Lowestoft isn't a small town - it's the second-largest town in Suffolk, with a population of around 72,000 - but, like many coastal towns in the UK, it has a small-town feel.

'They Come In Waves' includes two Sapphic women I encountered in Marks and Spencer Foodhall in the town centre, and an anxious older man who wanted to buy a copy of a gay magazine (DNA, if you're interested), but was clearly worried about being observed doing so. I've never had any interest in gay magazines (or any other kind of 'adult' magazine), but I felt for this guy, because I've been in the place of wondering whether it's safe to take something I wanted.

So, I bought a copy of the magazine - and watched the guy find the confidence to take his own copy.

For me, this is what poetry is about - snapshots of moments in lives which connect, but never interact. It's about recording things that would otherwise go unnoticed.

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