You’re wanting to use the phrase ‘desperately sad’
even though you’re not feeling that way and
you’re not even certain that those two words
qualify as a grammatical phrase.
You’re picturing a hand extended
and hearing a voice saying here, take it,
here’s everything you need, even though
you’re not, at the moment, lacking or wanting
or feeling particularly un-
fulfilled.
Yet you are, though, on this spring afternoon,
recalling in detail
that time when, on another spring afternoon,
you sat alone in a café bar
on the edge of a busy road on the edge of Mitte,
four hours or so, no-one else,
just yourself on your own drinking beer
at the side of a traffic-blasted road
at the edge of Mitte.
.
.
Niall Griffiths
Picture Mike Lesser
.