He'll go down the canal and get plastered

on a Sunday, knocking back a bottle of bootleg vodka

that looks like water and tastes like thinners.

For the first hour he'll be comprehensible, and talk with pride

about when he used to work at Imperial Typewriters,

and drank pints of mild in smokey pubs, but only on a Friday.

He'll tell you about the strike in '74, and the picket line of saris

screaming at the police. And from the way he talks,

and looks into the depth of the lock,

or at the bottom of the plastic cup that his mate, Mukesh,

brings along in a battered carrier bag,

you'd think he had sight into sunken worlds.

But after half a bottle the stories become fables,

or lies, depending on how you define fairy tales of alcohol

and loss. He'll tell you that he once rescued a woman

and a child

from a burning house in Braunstone, and that the worst thing

he ever did was to sprint across six lanes of a motorway

just to prove that he wasn't afraid.

Still, what I want to walk away with today,

along the towpath speckled with leaves,

is how he used to solder the typefaces onto the key levers,

and that he would test the strength and accuracy of his weld

by tapping out each letter against the platen,

only signing off his work on a certain, perfect note.

CONCERTO won the 2021 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, adjudicated by Peter Sirr. It was first published in issue 40 of Southword.