Brian Bilston is known as “the Twitter poet.” He’s shared his poems on Twitter and probably on other social media and attracted a large audience. His poems have been gathered together into a book. I’ve come across him not through Twitter but because a literary friend of my wife’s sent her a copy of his book. I snobbishly thought that the poems can’t be that bad if the friend shared the book and decided that I should “get out of my comfort zone” or my “snobbish literary prison,” as others might call it, and read my way through the book.

Most of the poems are funny in some way, and I think that any poet or would-be poet can identify with the thought in this poem. All will have dreamed of the great poem that will bring love, still the sands of time, end famine, and sort out the world, but the poem is lost when the dream ends. Or the poem remains unwritten, disappears in a haze of cannabis smoke, is buried with the poet, or, as in this case, left on the train.

The thought is good, the poem less so, but I admire the way that the last line jars, bringing home the horror of the lost poem.

“Poem, revised draft” by Brian Bilston

I had to write this poem again.
I left the first draft on the train
and now it doesn’t look the same.

The original was a paean to Love,
to Truth, to Beauty. It soared above
the everyday and all that stuff.

It would have healed estranged lovers’ rifts,
stilled the sands on which time shifts
and stopped the world before it drifts

further into quagmired crisis,
ended famine, toppled ISIS.
Employed ingenious literary devices.

I tried my hardest to recall
its words and rhymes, the rise and fall
of the carefully cadenced crawl

through the English language.
But it caused me pain and anguish
for there was little I could salvage.

It certainly didn’t end with a line like this.