Tick Tock and the me time from you
There is a shallow pool
For me to dip into.
The clock is on the wall
And it has not told the time
Outside on the street
Of what you will find.

You don’t come here much
And you do not tell me things
Like you used to bring
With your other friends
… so many friends
Time to blend in
The streets
With all the fretting feet
And the Nordic mannerisms
That never came between us.

Now I would rather catch a bus
And find myself watched
By some thing it is so
That gives me blowing down below.
What a homosexual show
These friendships turned out to be
When au fait was Asian and also British
And your European surrounded me with the Frigates.

They won’t be long now
In the hours of mannered time
When the rhyme is more simple
To the son who told the time.
He told the time in the school
And lost in on The Albert Hell
When he went to Concerts from University
And deified musicians for a fool.

This was me and you
As you looked me up and down
Happy to stay around
In my room because I was brown.
My music pleased you so
So we could go to the filum show
Where the heroes beat their chests
So their wives could get them their old age vests.
Mr Popularity. There is so much more to see
When the distance between you and me
Is at least Wide Screen Lap Tops and TV.

AI Summary

Your poem revisits a friendship that once felt intimate, electric, and culturally mixed — Asian, British, European — but has since dissolved into distance, silence, and the ache of being replaced. Time becomes the poem’s metronome: clocks that don’t speak, streets full of “fretting feet,” concerts, school corridors, and the widening gap between who you were together and who you are now. Beneath the jealousy and the sting of being looked at “because I was brown” is a deeper grief: the loss of a connection that once felt like recognition, belonging, and shared escape. The final image — laptops, widescreens, TV — captures the cold modern distance that swallowed what was once warm, human, and close.