hunger 📕
poem 1/10 from warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021)
CN: addiction
hunger
the street is whistling to the animal in me, calling my name in all directions. I’m tired of being manipulated, tired of pacing circles in concrete looking for lunch I can’t afford; rolling dice with the road until I can’t tread another step, and the grey sky shatters like a rubik’s cube – and nothing left to do but kneel in a puddle of who I have to be now.
a man steps from a corso and closer to ask if I’m okay, if l was praying. I feel the same shiver of need in him: wind in a back alley, burden he carries as he shoulders a bucket of soil from a skip, a wish – to shift gears, to limp here unsteered and be – breathing beneath the wet yellow leaves of a tree, sap below the skin of knuckles pushed to bark.
like the lifeguard who told me he told his wife he was taking the dog for a walk and forgot to bring the dog with him. his hard body bent on a car by a reservoir, deep voice wobbling: I need this... city revving softly in his throat. and this man, keys in hand, reaching tenderly again to ask: are you okay? I have my own guilt. no space for yours. I nod once and walk away.
[💽 AUDIO COMING]
An excerpt of “Hunger” was displayed at London Bridge Station for National Poetry Day 2021.
Shaun Hill (born 1996) is a poet, somatic educator, and working-class survivor of decades of multi-agency failings, living in the British Midlands. He’s the author of warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021), A Mushroom Wastes Nothing (Substack, 2026), and the developer of Loop & Line: Experiments in Physical Thinking.
He’s over 40 poems into his second full-length collection, And Now The Body Speaks. He writes for the voices who will dance medicine twenty years from now: a taproot decompacting the soil of the unspeakable.