E. K. KRAFFT - POEMS

E.K. Krafft is a British writer and poet based in London. Their writing has appeared, from 2012 onwards in Eunoia Review, Crack the Spine, Yellow Mama Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Brilliant Flash Fiction and the Scarlet Leaf Review.

 The Sixth Richest Country in the World

​At the trunk line terminus
There’s a man trying to prise
A cigarette half-smoked and damp
From the plug of wrappers and flies
Filling a choked stormdrain to the grate.
 
Getting it takes him all of four long tries.
‘It’s not bad, four tries for a free fag.’
 
He stows it in shaking hands and shies
From the high-vizzed contract staff who move
Him along, and disappears. Slantwise
Shapeless tattered coat grey with age
Lost in crowds who loudly sermonise
On the sad state of English railways
And ‘the tramps that plague the station on weekdays.’

Soloist
​

​She was one of dozens,
So many dozens,
(I wouldn’t have thought…)
Stooping over the pavements,
Rooting through the stubs,
Looking for something smokeable--
 
An opera singer she was,
Who set up under Blackfriars Bridge each night,
Singing among fallen takeout boxes
And a slick of autumn leaves.
Bankers mocked her solos
(And I shuffled on without change
To give her—)
 
Lived in my town, fifty miles up the railway,
Got my train, sang in the town centre--
Or on the station approach,
Rooting on the pavement,
With the others stooping,
Rooting for a fag end
With tobacco unsmoked--
 
And one day, she setting up, town centre, to sing,
I finally had some change and handed it over
Before she’d sung a word
And she said, ‘that’s a good start.’
I said, ‘I hope so,’
And that was that
 

Melodrama Against Workplace Bullying
​

​‘You’re conspiring,’ she says.
‘Conspiring against me,’ she says.
‘I know your game.’
 
And I say
‘My eyes--
They are spent flashbulbs,
My heart--
It broke a decade ago--
My smile is rictus,
My soul is smoke,
My dreams are ash,
And you say
I am conspiring against you?’
 
‘You’re conspiring all right,’ she says.
‘I know you are,’ she says.
‘I know your game.’
 
‘My friend, I say,
Our souls, mine and yours,
Are autumn leaves,
Crumbling in a fist.
When you hear the automated announcer
On the jammed out morning train
Stutter and repeat and skip and yip
In some sick parody of human laughter,
You realise that—’
 
‘I know you’re conspiring,’ she says.
‘You’re a no-gooder,’ she says.
‘I can read you like a book.’
 
And so on