Year of the Crayfish

After that, they started eating everything
in the name of God or rights or self-determination
or the sanctity of their eggs.
They repeated the story on TV news with a map
charting the key waterways and obstructions.
You could see the concrete rimed on their lips,
and fragments of glass crusted along their hairlines.
“Go with the Flow,”
they said like it was a slogan.
Some districts were left as wrecks of twisted steel
under seething nests of cables.
Other streets escaped, chewed around the edges,
roofs ripped off then thrown away
as if there was something wrong with the taste.
There you might be, in a local bar, and someone
would smash his glass with a sudden claw.
“So what?” he’d say like we were in a comic book
framed with cosmic supervillains.
“Go with the Flow”
Beyond the curtains of your home, you heard
the nightly clash and scuttle of armored divisions
removing those found without a carapace
for their own protection.
Next morning, viscera scattered our town squares
with a reek of dockyard waste.
Or you would sit in a café, your cup cold with fear
as your friend’s eyes started to glitter and darken.
“Go with the Flow,”
she would say and you both would know.
Or you might catch a neighbor through the wall
snapping at his wife before the windows smashed.
So we made shells from own silence
and we danced everywhere as if we were the Flow,
transparent, icy and scintillating,
swirling around everything without consequence,
dividing and confluent.
We spoke as a river speaks in bends and rapids
known only to ourselves
as their hard battalions marched on,
consuming their own for sustenance and spectacle.

Commended in the UK National Poetry Prize, 2025