Shred

Shred

In the quiet hum of a London flat,
paper quivers in the heat‑laced air—
a single page, a thin, trembling strip
of ink smeared like a forgotten match‑ticket.
It shrivels at the edge, a dancer's shawl
in the wind of the old radiator,
and in its ragged folds there is a mercy: the past nothing but a thin breath.

It is the bruised memory of a night out in Soho,
a rasp of a guitar that shreds the silence,
a riff that runs faster than a Tube train at 5.07 pm,
traced in the chalk‑ing of a hostel’s wall,
the sonic noise that tore us free of the ordinary.

Shred is the gap between cup of tea and the call of duty,
the torn bit of a passport stamped to an echo of a road,
the fine line where the outskirts of town meet the motorway,
the bit of thread that pulls a person’s fringe apart,
and the razor‑thin thread of a pop‑song slipping from a scratched record.

It should be, in the mind of a guzzler in a smog‑wrapped alley,
a slice of unbeaded cheese on a London curry,
the dropping clatter of a war‑worn tin box, an old bin that coughs in the wind.
To be a shred: the thud in a refugee camp music that thuds with someone’s heartbeat,
a word leaked out from a (twice) _llo___ (broken vow) on a broken nail.

The shame of the old man, with a paddle at the pub,
he chants "Give me a 99p coin to change one last time,"
and his words become a shiver against the psychic scar –
a swirl of fag‑stained paper tucked in a pillowcase for a night on the West Coast of an estate block.

In the end, the thing that matters is what one does with the shred.
You can kill the fragile line that has been cut by a pair of fingers,
leave it as a hum of possibility,
or pile it up as the backdrop for a fan‑lit festival in a barn that belies an entire youth country of whispers.

Because every shred is a story, a single silver gleam that burns with a hidden irony,
of a word and a sound that don’t skip from the air.
If we treat it right, we’ll never be gutted of such memories,
because the choice to keep it whole is already a small shred of hope.