Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high / Clusters of lights over empty chairs / That face each other, coloured differently. / Through open doors, the dining-room declares / A larger loneliness of knives and glass / And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads / An unsold evening paper. Hours pass, / And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds, / Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room. // In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How / Isolated, like a fort, it is — / The headed paper, made for writing home / (If home existed) letters of exile: Now / Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.