To The Cross-legged Boy in the Shopping Arcade       I saw you as I waited outside the bookshop for my friend who is always late. You were sitting cross-legged in the entrance to a shopping arcade,   leaning on your backpack, scribbling in a hardbacked notebook,   with skinny arms, sandy hair flopping over one eye.   I wished I could see what you were writing:   a poem, a journal entry, a story, a love letter.   I mean, it could have been a list of girls you wanted to kill or fuck.   But I knew it didn’t really matter.   In that moment, I loved you, and all that you stood for:   the urgency and intensity and passion of youth.   You could have been a Goethe or a Rilke.   You didn’t care that you might get cigarette ash or chewing gum on your jeans,   or that passers-by might think you scruffy or odd.   I wrote these observations down on the back of a Tube map so I wouldn’t forget.   When I looked up, my friend was standing in front of me,   obscuring my view of the shopping arcade entrance and of you.   Entering the bookshop felt like a bereavement.   When we came out, you and your notebook and your backpack were gone.   I hope you managed to write it all down, what was in your head.   I hope you will look at it one day and love your young self   for having been urgent and intense and passionate once.