From the beer garden

of the Prince of Wales

on Gloucester Road,

Bristol

 

you can see a high wall of white brick

clean as the tiled splashbacks

in the washrooms of expensive restaurants.

 

What we want

is not always

what is good for us.

 

What the wall wants

is a spray-paint cock and balls

the height of a giraffe.

 

What we feel most sharply

is sometimes what is missing.

 

Suppose, next year, something happens:

a religious revival

a ban on aerosols

or maybe we just grow up

 

and no-one

anymore

sketches cartoon genitals

 

(except for one professor

of prehistoric art

who pretends to be disappointed

when her students snigger).

 

It would be a changed world!

Like a world without war

or cruelty.

A better world –

but less familiar.

 

Would you fit in such a world?

What would you talk about?

How would you know what you were for

or against?

 

May you never be shown

what clean air could do to your lungs,

how you have raged against justice,

or what you did to love

when it found you.
Tom Sastry is a poet and spoken word artist living in Bristol. He was chosen by Carol Ann Duffy as one of the 2016 Laureate’s Choice poets and his debut pamphlet Complicity was published by Smith/Doorstop in October 2016.