Disclosure

DISCLOSURE

"And you must never, ever, ever disclose 

price information, even if it's rough --

saying they'd charge about a pound still shows

enough to compare."  This bit loud enough

for the next Costa table.  Harmlessly --

an induction, with no such information,

and no one would have heard much of what she

said. If you were hot on pronunciation

you might have caught the haitches.  This was work,

hospital contracts.  The haitch-shibboleth

disclosed in this mall nothing worth a lurk,

no tribal loyalty of life or death.

Further (accents disclose no changeless natures),

it's enn aitch ess, it seems, even from haitchers.

The poem dates from October 2017 and, like so much of my recent work, it arose from a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. Start now. Keep going.  Chapter 8 asked for something about a street.  I chose Cambridge's Grand Arcade shopping mall, and the Costa Coffee outlet there, and a thing overheard at a neighbouring table.

It has dipped its toe in publication.  In January 2020, the broadcaster James O'Brien tweeted

"I’d back the scrapping of HS2 just to stop people saying ‘haitch’ on the news"

and I threw the poem's final couplet in among the replies -- not the first time I have rendered a poem ineligible for most competitions by partial self-publication in social media.