AS YOU GET ON, YOU CAN’T REMEMBER NAMES
As you get on, you can’t remember names.
You try to tiptoe round these personnel mines
in conversation; but it’s deathly mute,
this universe where the anonymous meet.
Nameless rather than senseless is this world.
Just like the town of X, and that is where
XX your obedient servant now observes
the mist rising beyond his black pane’s square.