I saw Humphrey Bogart in a train station,
Crewe, three o’clock in the morning,
and he looked as faded and grey as I felt
stumbling half asleep off the late service.
When I was ushered out the doors, he was just there
by the taxi rank, leant up on a pillar, smoking,
lit up silver in passing headlights. He followed me
to the phone box, going grainier about the edges with each step
and when I’d paid my fifty pence and planned
my way home, he was no more than a faint suggestion,
a leftover image, a black-and-white echo
from a picture long past.