Two little
pieces I wrote. The first one I wrote in Waterloo around 11pm. Was crossing the
road towards the station and a guy was playing amazing guitar, watched by a
blonde woman kneeling down. You could feel the connection between them. A bus
light blared in the dark as it stopped for me on the crossing. He stopped
playing, so I walked a little bit and stopped, waiting for him to start again.
A train trundled over. He didn’t play again, so I stood there and wrote this
poem, and then got my bus. Then I had a cheap cup of tea in a pub and wrote the
second poem, Freedom, and later I listened to a guy play the theme tune to Merry
Christmas Mr Lawrence by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Waterloo
guitar man
You take
in the echoes of nature,
all the
missing pieces, the zeroes,
half-lives
strewn, never fully realised,
trains munching
metal girders, rumbling
carcasses,
levelled wings of steel.
We live
in seconds, places taken,
spaces reinvented
so we can fit in them.
Music
pursues as a waterfall,
ushering
me across a stained-out road,
bus lights
picking shadow from loin;
neon cut-glass
glows, shrapnel howls –
we seek
escape from the beaten scrawl
while part-notes
mimic it all.
We count
in time,
play with
rhythms half-recalled. Stalled moments.
A musician
sends a postcard to the moon,
rays caught
on a double clef, romanticised,
this train
the accompanying drumbeat
transporting
sound into another yard.
Copyright
Vickie Johnstone, June 27, 2026
