The Queue for Love

By Matthew Parish

Sunday 15 November 2026

Beneath the streets of Lviv, where the night

Had settled into its accustomed dread,

A cellar bar was burning rather bright,

And everyone was drinking off their head.

The music pounded through the ancient stone,

The girls were dressed for summers long since gone,

And I, who ought to have been safe at home,

Was drinking to the prospect of the dawn.

I'd been expelled from there the night before,

For pissing in a sink, a minor crime,

Though guards had thrown me halfway through the door

And treated me quite roughly at the time.

I'd since apologised. They seemed content.

They let me in, with drinks upon the house.

A curious arrangement, this consent

To let a man return, as quiet as a mouse.

And now I stood beside the lavatory,

Where half the population seemed to wait,

A queue of quite extraordinary glory,

A monument to drink and human fate.

For all our cleverness, our ancient learning,

Our politics, our sexual appetite,

The bladder has its own peculiar yearning,

And puts us all in order for the night.

A woman stood beside me, scarcely dressed,

With eyes that offered something like affection,

Her breasts made little effort to be pressed

Into the ordinary rules of discretion.

She smiled at me, and asked me where I'd been,

And why I looked so tired, and lived alone.

She was the loveliest thing I'd lately seen,

And touched my arm as though I were her own.

Above us, somewhere, Russia launched her drones.

The sirens might have sounded. No one cared.

We stood beneath the city and its stones,

Pretending that the world could still be spared.

She pressed herself against my overcoat,

And whispered something pleasantly obscene.

I thought of all the things that men have wrote

About the distance between what is and what might have been.

A drunk appeared, impossibly far gone,

And staggered to the front as though by right.

He wore the face of someone who had won

A private war against the previous night.

The queue objected. He objected more.

He lurched against the wall, and nearly fell.

He seemed uncertain what the queue was for,

Or whether he was waiting there for hell.

The woman laughed, and drew herself more near,

And said she thought that I was rather sweet.

Her breath was full of vodka, warmth and beer,

Her stockings hardly reached her naked feet.

I might have kissed her. She appeared inclined.

And yet I saw, behind her lovely face,

The practised generosity of mind

That loneliness mistakes for saving grace.

For what was love, beneath those vaulted bricks,

But two bewildered strangers passing time,

While history performed its crueller tricks,

And missiles made a mockery of rhyme?

The pretty girls were selling us the dream

That life remained a simple, pleasant game,

While somewhere in the east, beside a stream,

Young men were dying without any name.

At last the toilet opened. Someone swore.

The drunk went in, despite the general rage.

I wondered what we'd all been waiting for,

As though this cellar were a little stage

On which the oldest human farce was played:

Desire, embarrassment, the need to piss,

The promises that beautiful girls made,

And all the things we hope to find in this.

She asked me if I'd take her somewhere else,

A quiet place, perhaps, to spend the night.

Her fingers played upon my jacket's welts,

Her smile suggested everything was right.

But there was something manufactured there,

A tenderness too easily supplied,

As though affection floated in the air

To keep the thought of death outside.

I left her with a kiss upon the cheek,

And stumbled up the staircase to the street.

The November wind was bitter, sharp and bleak,

And cobblestones were treacherous to my feet.

The city stood in darkness, old and wise,

Its churches watching over empty squares.

I thought again about her lovely eyes,

And all the things a lonely man declares.

Perhaps she'd meant it. Perhaps she'd meant it not.

Perhaps such distinctions hardly matter now.

One takes whatever tenderness one's got,

And seldom asks precisely why or how.

For sex is sometimes kindness in disguise,

And kindness sometimes merely sex deferred.

And love is what we call the pleasant lies

We tell ourselves when nothing can be cured.

I reached my room before the morning came,

Too drunk to sleep, too tired to feel regret.

The darkness and the silence were the same

As all the other nights I can't forget.

And somewhere underneath the sleeping town,

That endless queue was probably there still,

While women smiled, and drunken men fell down,

And Russia waited patiently to kill.

I lay upon the bed, without undressing,

And thought how strange it was to be alive:

That all this touching, wanting and caressing

Should flourish in the cellars of Lviv.

We stand in queues for things we cannot keep,

We pay for love with drink, or pride, or pain,

And when at last the city falls asleep,

We wake, and want the whole damned thing again.