The bright green table floats in the dark, and you hold the lager

like a lantern, and the water like a spell,

for our mate just back

from rehab. Last year

he raved about smoking crack. Look at his hand

when he makes a bridge, the finger blown up

by heroin.

At school

he was smart and funny. He still is. Somewhere,

between standing in goal at break-time, and writing out lyrics in maths,

he found smack.

We drink

and laugh. Talk returns to the past, it usually does. We didn't know

that families fail, bodies ache, and soma is a poppy

brought down from the hills

and packed in trucks,

shipped to the kids in two-bit flats, the boys

who dream. What the world would be, and what was fate.

Before the mutant cells

in girls

I loved. The slight young things who slept on parks. Deals

gone wrong, and then stabbed or cut. Calling on the phone

for an angel

medic on Christmas Day,

stitching up your arm on the A&E ward. The prince in a gown

with his arse hanging out.

We laugh some more,

tally up the score,

and rack another game. Quiet now, thinking of the dead

as you bend to the light,

how the baize

glows in the muted hall.

Snooker was a commended poem in the 2024 Waltham Forest Poetry contest.