New Poem: Worms

If you put a tent up on long grass and you

leave the tent with its groundsheet down

on the grass for about three weeks, the

grass starts to rot. When you take up the

groundsheet, you find the grass has gone

yellow and smells. Worms seem to like it

and sometimes you find clusters of them

wiggling about together. One holiday we

were on the Welsh borders and our tents

were up for four weeks. We took them

down when it was time to go home and

there was a cluster of worms just where I

had been lying. I went over and had a look

at them. As I walked round them, I could

see that they had clustered together in the

shape of the bus routes near where we

lived. I called my friend over and said,

‘Here look at this, it’s the bus map.’ He

said, ‘Oh yeah.’ He looked at it closely

and then he noticed something: ‘There’s

no 43. The 43 is missing.’ He was right.

‘The map would be no good without the

43,’ he said. ‘The 43 is a really useful

route. The 43 goes all the way down the

Holloway Road.’