Must Have Lunch

How about lunch? No - not this week.
Work’s at a peak.
Whose turn? Sounds good.
Agreed - we should
ask our PAs to find a date.
Your new card? Great.
Promotion? Neat.
Looks a hot seat.
And hey - that ring. Hitched, I conclude?
Me? Not yet. Who’d
have me?  Whoops - now
I must dash. Ciao.

Christ, has it really been a year?
My fault, I fear –
so many trips
abroad, time zips
by. Where? Dubai, Mumbai, Brunei,
Shanghai . . .  Let’s try
again - on me
of course. I see
from the FT you’re on the move.
Well, I approve:
I had a hunch.
Yes, must have lunch.

Apologies - the diary’s hell.
In shape? All well?
Thanks - just the gym.
Ageing’s a grim
business. Children? You lucky guy . . .
I don’t think my
life would allow
all that, somehow.
We owe ourselves a real chinwag.
Barring some snag -
asap, a lunch . . .

Do you do brunch?

Tom Vaughan

In today’s information-overload age, I think there’s a particular place for poetry - for texts which (ideally) need more than one reading, and which can vibrate inside over a lifetime. I won’t claim that the pieces in this short collection necessarily achieve that objective, but my goal in putting together the poems I have written in ‘minute’ form (12 lines and 60 syllables in each verse, with a strict rhyme and line length pattern) with a few others was a volume asking some of the Unanswerable Questions in an un-heavy way, which readers could get through in one sitting but would then want to re-explore. I also hoped that the result would be an appropriately-small stocking filler for the Christmas season . . .

The book can be purchased from:https://www.amazon.co.uk/JUST-MINUTE-Tom-Vaughan/dp/8119654773

If you have any thoughts about this poem or this publication,  Tom Vaughan would be pleased to hear them