Salt And Vinegar Poem by Matthew Griffiths

Salt And Vinegar

In my cold and stony city I wandered
From a sleepless night and ambled
In the neon haze of fast food alleys litter
Eddying its swirling papers blow:

Movement takes my eye and now my feet
On crackling crystals diamond winter frost now glistening
Ice, now grinding glass and now outside the open door
In the kitchen’s humid oily blast to:

Twinkling tiny grains of salt that fall from
Paper wrappers oily packed steam rolled
And patted by the bony hands of the fish shop girl
Who’s vacant distant face stares worn and tired through:

The steamy dripping window and shows a languid resolution
To customers abuses as she in turn shakes salt
And douses at the wounds of this factory town
I see as heated vinegars acrid vapour permeates:

The row of heavy boots and coated whiskered faces paled
By pungent queasy fish-fats and alcoholic glaze, a face: the only one
That with sunken keen eyed sharpness glares
With sullen careless challenge and total disregard for:

Self or human beings, a void in search of feeling
Resentments vitriolic causes long forgotten
A smouldering emotion if violence could inspire
Ignite, flare up, explode, then so be it: What am I to him?

And from his steady look although I saw no simple sign from him
No hostile indication, I felt a grip of fear, an instinctive native warning that Among the city’s faces in the numbness of it’s night’s narcotic
Subdued, depleted careless rabble, a fight could soon be:

Kindled, like predator and prey his confidence revealed my fear and so
I looked away, but not towards the night or road but towards
The fish shop girl I know my vision strayed, and in that instant fleeting
What came to me was realisation

That she had by chance been witness to that glance of briefest meeting
Without a word or signal, as if by undiscovered sense
They saw each other and now I the viewer being
Saw the play within the play of natures primal driving the:

Man to man hostility, the female’s choice her power in the fray
So he the final victor smiles and she returns her blessing
As I stand outside the scene, my role in it forgotten
It occurred to me in an abstract way:


As I trod the glistening Kerbstones later
That they complement each other
Like the condiments of that nightly trade
She the alkali, he the acid: Salt and vinegar

Matt Griffiths.