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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here
 

Talk of the Street

 

He chimed I... I... I... to fill up the quiet

the same as when she was alive. And when she left

his was the loudest sob - peeling the hour, clockwork. 

 

We all agreed he was a selfish bastard - 

it was the talk of the street that he beat her,

and as we hunched with grief under black umbrellas

 

we felt his anguish crackle over us like rain. 

But it was his loss, his pain, that mattered. 

Hours later he was still raging at her headstone,

 

hoarding clods of earth in his fingernails. 

He spent the whole of November bringing her roses.

He flogged the rest of our grief like a carpet.