Isn’t the role of verbs interesting? The verbs that denote action, what’s happening here and now. They’re like the little hands on a clock, they tell you the exact time in sentences. Whereas waiting, like the clock in the dentist’s surgery, could have the minute hand stopped or the second hand skipping. Waiting renders verbs useless. Sentences without verbs, like cutting a puppet’s strings. Nothing moves. On the contrary. In the waiting something is paused: the verbs are like ornaments. And the verb ‘wait’ looks very similar to a sofa. Oh, those big fluffy cushions.

I bought a floor cleaner called Poet. Today I cleaned the kitchen with Poet. The apartment smells nice, if a bit sweet. Which is what you’d expect if you use poetry to do your housework, though the moment poets have the same task as disinfectant, something’s gone wrong. My mother, for example, would never buy a cleaning fluid called Poet; a product called Action would be more up her street. She’d see the word Poet as a nuisance, like some inherited furniture she’d have declared useless and thrown out long ago given half a chance. My mother would have got rid of poetry just like every summer she got rid of things she considered unusable from the cupboard my brother and I shared. Our choice of cleaning products shows how we’re different. I bought Poet, with the scent of wild flowers, because it seemed like the epitome of everything I hate most about poetry.

A long conversation about Poet floor cleaner with Luis Felipe. He read me some verses that, in his opinion, are classics of the floor-cleaner genre. ‘This guy is like a Jehovah’s Witness of rhyme,’ he said. We reached the point where his laughter was making me laugh. Before hanging up, I told him how much I loved him.

I think I end phone calls to my friends with a whiff of Poet.