Our Group Chat Is Basically a Literary Salon
Three plumbers' quotes, one meme, and then suddenly, Rilke.
The most important literary institution in my life is a group chat called Emergency Kebab Committee, and its archive would confuse any scholar who tried to study it. Scroll up and you will find, in order: three competing quotes for fixing Danny's boiler, a meme of a horse in a suit, an unexplained photo of Wes's foot, and then, arriving like a bishop at a water fight, four lines of Rainer Maria Rilke.
No context. No emoji. Just Rilke, glowing on five phones across two time zones at 11:40 on a Thursday night.
We are five men in our forties who met at school when we were eleven, which means we have been legally forbidden from expressing sincere emotion to each other for over thirty years. The chat reflects this. Its official business is banter, boiler repair, and a fantasy football league of such pettiness that one year Danny changed his team name to a personal insult about my hairline and kept it for the entire season. Its unofficial business, it turns out, is poetry.
It started the week Wes's dad died.
We all went to the funeral, obviously. We stood in a row in bad suits and gripped Wes's shoulder in turn, one pump each, like a car jack, and said "anything you need, mate," which is the traditional incantation, and then we all went home having said nothing at all.
The chat stayed silent for two days, which had never happened in eleven years.
Nobody knew what to type. A meme felt obscene... Sincerity felt worse.
It was Marcus, of all people, Marcus who works in insurance and once described a sunset as "decent," who broke the deadlock at midnight with a screenshot from a poetry site. Four lines about how the dead are not gone but changed, folded into everything, closer than they were before.
He did not add a message. Adding a message would have made it a Feeling, and Feelings were banned under chat law. He just left the poem there, the way you leave a casserole on a doorstep, ring the bell, and walk away.
Nobody replied for six hours...
Then Wes wrote, "read this 14 times. cheers." Then Danny, our resident vandal, our lowest brow, posted four lines of Mary Oliver underneath it, and the world quietly tilted.
None of us could say "I love you" out loud. So we said Rilke instead, and everyone understood the translation.
Somehow, without a single conversation about it, this became the system. The chat runs on filth and football for weeks at a stretch, and then one of us hits weather. A divorce, a diagnosis, a kid in trouble, a redundancy. And within a day or two, a poem lands in the chat like a flare over dark water. Never with commentary. Commentary is still illegal.
The poem simply appears, and the man it is meant for knows it is meant for him, and he replies with something gruff and inadequate, and that is that. Larkin when Pete's marriage wobbled. Szymborska when Marcus's daughter was in hospital, which Danny definitely found by searching something like "poem hospital waiting hope," and none of us will ever mock him for it, because it was exactly right.
I want to defend us against a charge nobody has made yet: we are not secretly sophisticated. Wes thinks Keats is a type of trainer. The poems are almost always screenshots, frequently watermarked, occasionally attributed to the wrong poet entirely, and once, memorably, a passage Danny swore was ancient wisdom that turned out to be from a mattress advertisement. It did not matter. It was a good mattress advertisement. It said the thing.
Because that is the actual discovery, the one that took five oblivious men three decades to make: most of us have feelings vastly in excess of our vocabulary, and poems are how you borrow a better writer's mouth. Friends who share poems are not showing off. They are outsourcing. Somewhere a dead Austrian has already said the unsayable thing, phrased for you, ready to forward.
Then came the Thursday that broke the format.
A poem arrived with no screenshot, no watermark, typed directly into the chat. Fourteen lines about a man who fixes other people's water, "the patron saint of under sinks," who spends his days on his back in the dark under strangers' kitchens listening to their lives walk around above him. It was funny... and then, in the last three lines, it was not funny at all, and I read it on the sofa and my chest did something complicated.
"who's this then," asked Wes. "heaney?"
Silence... A typing bubble appeared and disappeared three times, which in our chat is the equivalent of a man pacing outside a confessional.
"it's mine," wrote Pete.
Pete. The actual plumber. The quietest man in the chat, the one whose longest recorded message was "can do tuesday."
He had been doing a night course, it turned out, working through lessons on how to write after jobs, sitting in his van at the end of driveways with a notebook against the steering wheel. Eight months. He had told nobody, because we are who we are, and he knew fifteen years of boiler banter would be aimed at him within seconds.
Here is my proudest fact about the Emergency Kebab Committee: the banter never came.
Danny, who once mocked me for a week over a haircut, wrote, "mate." Marcus wrote, "that last bit. under sinks. mate." Wes wrote, "MATE," and in our dialect three mates in a row is a standing ovation, is roses thrown at a stage.
We made him post it somewhere real. He resisted for a month, and then one Sunday he put it up on a community wall for poets under his actual name, Peter Okafor, and strangers started leaving comments, and he screenshotted every single one into the chat like a boy showing his mum his marks. Later I found a page of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet and sent it to him with no message, in accordance with chat law. He is thinking about it... For Pete, thinking about it is practically a book deal.
The chat is still ninety percent nonsense. This is by design. You cannot run a salon at full sincerity, it would collapse in a day, like a pub that only serves wedding toasts. The horse in the suit returns. The fantasy league rages on. My hairline remains under review.
But last month I woke at one in the morning to my phone glowing on the nightstand, and it was Pete, who had a new one, typed straight into the chat, about his father teaching him to bleed a radiator, "letting the trapped air out so the heat can move," and you did not need the night course to see what that poem was actually about.
I lay in the dark next to my sleeping wife and read it four times.
Then I replied, "mate," and put the phone down, and the little screen glowed a few seconds longer, like something banked but still burning.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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