—the word’s on the tip of your tongue
(or, as you say it, tong), as we take tea.
Waiting for you to speak, I sip mine:
Tetley’s tastes of nothing, but I suppose
it’s good to know true flavourlessness,
the prose of life we sugar over with verse.
Ceylon you say—a trochee not an iamb—
referring to the drink I drink
with two spoonfuls at home and, here, none.
Though by ‘home’, I mean the house
my parents live in and where I grew up;
like, and unlike, them saying ‘back at home’
when they intend Sri Lanka, and not Leeds
where they live and I haven’t, not for years.