NOBODY WRITES POEMS ABOUT THIS

There is a great deal of poetry about extraordinary lives. This is not that.

This is about the ten to six. The rota on the fridge in two different pens. The form that asks how many hours you care for someone, with a box that wants a number. The shoes bought properly in August at the cost of something else that was never mentioned to anybody.

Most people live like this. It is, statistically, what a life is.

And almost nothing is written about it, which leaves an enormous number of people with the quiet impression that their own days are the part before the real thing starts.

They are not. There is no real thing coming. This is it.

138 POEMS FOR THE PARTS NOBODY DESCRIBES

- The four minutes it takes to hand over eight hours, in which the honest report is: nothing happened, and I was there the entire time that nothing happened, which is the job.

- The car park at twenty past six, sitting in it a while before driving, for no reason at all.

- The form that asks how many hours. Do you count the twenty minutes on hold, or only the four minutes of the call.

- Nine steps from the bed to the door, and the difference between gripping a hand and offering one - which she can tell, and so, it turns out, can you.

- The fifteen minutes at half past nine when the house is empty and you sit down on purpose and do not tidy anything.

- The mental load, which has no photographs, because nobody takes a picture of remembering.

WHAT HELP ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE

Not the offers. The offers were sincere and there were many and none were used, because to use an offer you must first construct a task and explain it, and there was no surplus for that.

What worked was a man who mowed the lawn. He did not ask. He had a mower and a Saturday and a view of the grass, and he simply mowed it, and never once mentioned it.

Do not ask what you can do. The question is generous and it is a task. Ask instead: I am at the shop, what do you need. I can take Tuesday, is Tuesday any use. I am outside with a coffee for you, you do not have to come out.

THE WORK THAT HOLDS THINGS OPEN

Somebody drove the bread down the A1 at two in the morning so that a town they will never see could have a normal Tuesday. The dinner lady who does one tray in a way that means nobody at that table could tell. The porter who talks nonsense the whole way down two floors, so that a frightened person arrives having been, for four minutes, a person in a conversation rather than a person being transported.

There is no line on any budget for that.

AND THE WORD UNREMARKABLE

On a scan report it is a compliment. Nothing here requiring attention. A system quietly doing what it does without producing an event.

It is the finest report a life can get, and it is written in a language nobody has thought to translate.

Being exhausted is not the same as being unwell, and this book says so plainly, with the practical difference and the crisis numbers, twice.

For anybody who has concluded that their life is the waiting room.

It is not. It never was. There is no real thing coming, and you have been doing the real thing this whole time.