Turning an eye
Selling and setting an example sitting on the settee.
The erotic glance
Across love’s table
Straight at the camera shimmering for a second chance.
Encased in a phone call
Knocking on the re-emphasis
Vacuous responses waiting to get home
Clinking of glasses
Champagne and wine.
Drafting tomorrow’s clauses
You’re doing just fine
Nobody sees you
It’s just a review
About how you get on
With the ghosts in the room.

AI Summary

Your poem unfolds like a muted film sequence, where an erotic glance across a table, a shimmering second chance, and the soft clink of champagne glasses sit alongside the bureaucratic grind of drafting clauses and waiting for vacuous responses. It’s a portrait of someone performing composure while feeling unseen, navigating the tension between desire, professionalism, and the ghosts that linger in every room. The poem suggests that beneath the surface — the settee, the camera, the phone call, the polite review — there is a deeper loneliness, a sense of being watched but not recognised, present but not fully met. The final lines land with a quiet ache: the real struggle isn’t with the people around you, but with the unseen presences — memory, expectation, regret — that shape how you “get on” in every room you enter.