by Clare Pollard

He goes to Pret-a-Manger every day,
likes something chickeny, or maybe Thai,
takes it back to the office to bolt, an e-mail dinner,
or perhaps - if, like today, he has a window -
to this sunstruck square of grass
that is alive with suits, WAP phones and knees,
crammed as a slave-ship, or the Mayflower,
to broil his nose and ankles FT pink.

Sunspot screensavers burn into his eyes,
and he notes a growth in interest, as the temp from accounts
hitches her skirt up, chopsticking
thick coins of sushi into her parched mouth.
A pigeon pecking at the prematurely balding grass
finds the nub of a Cajun tortilla wrap,
a frill of lollo rosso, then flaps up to settle
on one roof along the square’s concrete sales graph.

The May sky is cloudless, and as azure
as Stephenson’s head on the five pound note.
Summer means smart-casual, so he wears chinos,
is porcine in a Paul Smith shirt - its cost a mere drop
out of fifty grand a year, plus bonuses.
Dinner, later, could be the cracked cymbals of poppadoms,
the thick-lipped gob of a burger,
the bloated water lilies of prawn crackers.

And fifty grand a year, plus bonuses,
is pretty fair, he thinks, when all’s accounted for -
the nine-to-nine, the bolted bagels, RSI,
and these inadequate and sandwiched blasts of sun,
this child’s cress-patch of grass,
the numbness of the arse,
the tube train where he stands, jammed,
correspondence in a filing cabinet.

His half hour up, he stands and sweeps
his trousers clear of blades with heat-damp hands.
These gobbled-down breaks will soon be a rarity
if - fingers crossed - he gets his rise: such work demands.
A black girl picks up empty cans with pincers,
and John, who is on sixty five, has sent a text:
ptcher + piano ltr? it asks. Yes, he begins to reply,
then, thinking twice, sends simply y.