It’s footwear that I recognise
not faces but that’s no surprise:
I don’t look up, they don’t look down
except occasionally to frown
then look away and hurry on
and moments later they are gone.
There’s city Oxfords, polished, black,
worn by the older, banking pack,
and Converse sneakers for the lads,
whose work is fabricating ads.
The women, they too, dress that way:
I rarely see high heels today.
A constant stream of passing feet
flows by me on this busy street
while I sprawl here, small in my shawl,
and ask, do I exist at all?

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “During my early life I wrote non-rhyming verse, having been conditioned to believe that rhyme and metre were old-fashioned and therefore to be avoided: the last thing a young person wants is to be thought of as old-fashioned.
I was also prejudiced against humorous verse: my enjoyment of it was something of a guilty secret as my contemporaries all wrote dark, navel-gazing, stream-of-consciousness nonsense.
During Covid lockdown I found myself with time to reevaluate these blinkered views and finally embraced my love of nonsense verse. I set myself a goal of writing a light-hearted rhyme a day for the duration of lockdown, to assuage boredom, but once I had established a routine, I just kept on writing a bit of rhyming verse each day.
That was more than a thousand days ago and the rhymes just keep rolling out, one per day on Facebook, often inspired by the quirky images I find online but frequently the verse bubbles up of its own accord and I have to seek a suitable accompanying image.
As you might image, I now have an embarrassment of poems that, like the mayfly, live for, at most, one day and are gone. There’s no obvious long-term home for them.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Photo: “2016 – Mexico – Puebla – Street Person” by Ted’s photos – For Me & You is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.