Poem from a Sleepless Bed

He’s 14 or 15 years old, trying to fall asleep on the fold-out bed in his grandfather’s spare room. Having no luck, Smith begins replaying the conversations of that day with his family, in the car, at the Loch, around the table. Loch, which captures Smith’s uncle the way a photograph would attempt to, takes place in Scotland where the poet’s mother and uncle grew up, and where the protagonist often goes to escape his life in London. With Smith’s grandfather’s health slowly declining, perhaps there was a gravity to this particular trip that left the young poet tossing and turning all night. But it was the mundane happenings of the day which kept circulating in his mind. Arranging moments on paper, each fleeting feeling and off-the-cuff comment takes its place and comes together to create an image. Of a man in pain, a man who uses jokes for soothing, a man who is happy he caught a fish. He is all these men at once, and the boy he once was too.

Had Loch been a photograph, perhaps it would have to be a body of photographs to encompass the plurality this poem exists in. But still, we imagine the winding roads in our mind’s eye and watch as the hand grabs for that cigarette.