This has a lot in common with ‘Quality Goods’ (#625). I’ve always liked concretisation. One of the problems with poetry is that it’s often too fluid; it slips through your fingers. It’s a real puzzle why poetry’s not more popular than it is because our everyday prose is peppered with metaphors and similes and all sorts of clever figures of speech that we never think about twice about like the synecdoche. If someone said there’d been a message from Downing Street we’d never think for a second that a street in central London had acquired sentience and decided to communicate; we’d assume it was an announcement from the Prime Minister or a member of his staff.

It’s tempting to assume this is a poem about F. but I really can’t remember. An obvious reading is that this is me showing her a poem which she doesn’t get but I could be way off the mark.