Mr. Zadie Smith

The Bearhug
by Nick Laird

It’s not as if I’m intending on spending the rest of my life
doing this:
besuited, rebooted, filing to work, this poem a fishbone in
my briefcase.
The scaffolding clinging to St Paul’s is less urban ivy than
skin, peeling off.

A singular sprinkler shaking his head spits at the newsprint
of birdshit.
It’s going unread: Gooseberry Poptarts, stale wheaten
bread, Nutella and toothpaste.
An open-armed crane turns to embrace the aeroplanes
passing above.

I hadn’t the foggiest notion. Imagine: me, munching
cardboard and rubbish,
but that’s just what they meant when they said, Come in,
you’re dead-beat,
take the weight off your paws, you’re a big weary grizzly
with a hook through his mouth,

here, have some of this love.

Poets.org

Who is Nick Laird? As I walk to a bar in north London to meet him, I run everything I know about this man through my mind. I have seen the beautiful boy band face, gazing from the jacket of his debut novel Utterly Monkey. I have read the searing poetry - "Go home I haven't slept alone / In weeks and need to reach across / The sheets to find not warmth but loss." I know he is married to Zadie Smith. And I have heard that he hates journalists.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story
/0,6000,1475434,00.html

Meet Zadie Smith at:
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth257