NOT PLACE BUT TIME
New towns and garden cities are now despised but
a young child could go to Wimpy on the day before
starting secondary school and be on the verge of
newness in drab browns and oranges that weren't
dated then because you didn't know the decade you
were in and neither affluence nor want were felt as
judgements but lived through to say so now gets me
shot I just see Woolco and new shops the glass safe
yet to read about it today would say my parents and
others thought the country was doomed with money
evaporating and worries worse than old trains but
it doesn't seem so bad it's known what was true
plus the separateness gave us enough space
maybe this now plays somewhere just the same.
THASOS
Where were you when the mad winds used to blow?
Before all there was to know got taken by the calm
long ago, slowly then suddenly
so now on roads that stretch forever
I'll hear the anger and joy
as someone from then
walks past their old home
like a lonely boy grown and forgotten,
as a man stricken by the cold Thames
or watching the warm Aegean,
places lost to them
just things sung,
only known to me
somehow writing.
SOMEWHERE VERSUS NOWHERE (THE RIVER MIMRAM)
If I went back to those fields of childhood
would I know anything there? Of course not,
they don't exist anymore – although I'm
sure the old stretches of barbed wire wildness,
with horses no one seems to own or ride,
will still reach down to that chalk river with
its rubble banks and bridges unnoticed
by anyone but me. Worn stones under
which I caught Miller's thumbs or sticklebacks?
Still there for children from schools in summer
to know on those day that last forever,
before online worlds take them off nowhere.
DIAMONDS AS CARBON FROM THE SKY
It would be crass to say they fell as a hard rain, yet glittering, bouncing - sometimes shattering - the stones descended without warning on Tredworth, the most depressing of many such areas in Gloucester.
Perhaps they came from Jupiter, where such storms are common? Most people assumed it was summer hail. If this famous place had ever coruscated with gems, they were now found only in its magnificent Gothic cathedral; a treasure hemmed in by drug use, boarded-up shops and feral kids on bikes.
Most people that is but Jasper, who understood the riches strewn amongst the overgrown gardens, junkie parks and vandalised cars. He'd been named after a drug-addled choirmaster and possible murderer, in a similarly decaying cathedral city on the other side of England.
Years earlier, two notorious serial killers had buried most of the locals under patios, in torture-cellars or bedraggled Cotswold fields. The few survivors staggered through the town - it cannot be called a city - blinking in surprise and clutching cans.
Its most famous local resident was in fact buried in the cathedral, rumoured to have had a sizzling poker shoved up his arse.
Middle-class relocators took one look at the place and screeched off, desperate for Cheltenham or Tewkesbury. A few mistakenly moved to Cinderford, where certain unspeakable midnight rites are still practised in the public houses. The Forest of Dean hides their ashes - a reminder that left-liberalism can be dangerous folly.
Jasper gathered up his crop in a Lidl bag and went online. But prices in the wholesale diamond market had recently collapsed. Perhaps he could flog his booty in the Quays street-food market?
'Things can only get better!' was booming from a festival stage as he entered this site of gentrification.
ON VIBRANCY
What stories do they tell themselves on
why they moved to this country and who
they are, when even a street here makes
a difference and identity is everything?
I know the lies from economics, claiming
the English can never do anything.
Perhaps it's true we're overrun and
I wish so many hadn't come.
I didn't want to feel abroad,
sitting alienated by violent
jabbering on buses, harsh
elbows, hints of aggression.
Poets never say this though
it's not a poem, thank Christ.
CONFESSIONS OF A WATCH ADDICT
A wire mesh burning with white heat
dragged through factory butter - that's
my nerves now. The gorgeous fat
melted to clog every tiny window;
a would-be luxury in suffocation.
Even if you studied the elements,
my name hidden amongst them
in clear sight, nothing would be
seen. When you think of all my
bits and trinkets, it's not memory.
Did anyone ever write up all
their buying, mythologise the
hopes and dreads of purchasing
clobber as a dead but constant
witness to their entire life?
I've never read inventories
in obituaries. They might be
of interest - say a listing of
someone's possessions then a
link to e-bay? It's maybe coming.
Too maudlin to end on. So let's dream
of the wonders from Chinese factories,
working through the oriental sun and rain,
all still so cheap yet clearly catching on
the sad luxury of a Patek or Vacheron.
EVEN FLU WAS BETTER THEN
The security of deep reassurance is what
I got in childhood so that even flu bouts
seemed safe it must have been the very
early 70s I overheard Dad ringing my school
to say the four of us were off till after Christmas
the whole family was stricken I felt better then
remember getting up with everyone asleep such
a headache I could eat only ice cream wonderfully
few flavours and it tasted far nicer as I sat happily
watching TV feeling health return after incredible fever
the rest still zonked out no sound though all seemed fine
then I got ill three years ago but he was dead my Mum
going to dementia now I'm glad they never knew and we
were then parents the reassurance had to come from us still
I thought how often I spoke to them about dumb medical
worries it shows you can't tell what sticks and what goes.
THE SEEDY ‘70s
I love rundown 1970s shopping centres;
the piss-stained multiple story carparks,
dangerous pubs with flat roofs and
mugger underpasses of tiled murals.
Those failing covered markets
in leaking modernist blocks –
Birmingham, the Bullring.
It’s from my childhood,
Welwyn Garden City –
the trips through shabbier bits
of north London to Brent Cross,
then moving to Salisbury.
Of course, that’s partly
a towering medieval city,
alongside its random atmosphere of
pubs with brawling squaddies and
apprentice junkies, closing shoe shops,
frequent Army Surplus Stores plus
an inland pier – a truncated flyover
jutting over the scary Baptist church
and a potholed car park. All the towns
of Wessex and the West Country with
drugs problems! The central market,
unbelievable tat on offer, flogging
tartan 70s jackets, itchy front-door mats
spun from nylon pubes. I’ve old longings
for the windswept bus station, the dingy
bedsit land of the railway station by
Fisherton Street with its sordid
takeaways and pubs. I see Dad
by ‘The Yorkshire Fisheries’,
whey-faced as he recounted
the horrors he'd encountered.
The biscuit-brick bus station in
Endless Street was demolished.
We lived a lengthy school-bus
away so I'd spend days
there, the canteen from
Ten Rillington Place –
I now get flashbacks of
the corned-beef pasties.
I should mention those
twin Renaissance beauties of
Staines and Slough, places
I stupidly worked for years.
Their names enough
to capture this detritus.
Slough with its latticed
Brunel bus station over
England’s deadliest
underpass – making
A Clockwork Orange
seem urban perfection.
Staines High Street and
its Aberdeen Steak House
run by Assyrians – beef from
Chernobyl, Black Forest gateau
from a packet; the railway bridges
raining sparks as trains crossed.
Beneath them burger vans like
atrocity scenes from some
Congolese civil war.
Good days perhaps,
compared with identical
superstore retail parks.
Though hopes remain as
parts of those are perfect –
the kebab van by Wickes,
the cafe in Home Bargains.
COUNCIL HOUSES AND GARDEN CITIES
It’s a fact; middle-class people talk too much. I’m one, but checked by this old git who lives in my memory.
My first encounter was in Welwyn Garden City’s biscuit-brick cinema, aged about eight. The film was that colossal bore - Disney’s Fantasia - my interest finally awakened in the dinosaur fight.
I proceeded to narrate the exact characteristics of Tyrannosaurus and whoever he was devouring, for the benefit of an entire auditorium.
A nicotine-stained relic looked at me, an ex-spiv relocated from Stepney to the council estates by Nabisco’s.
‘Turn the volume down mate.’
How he lurks in the mind! That ever present policeman in peripheral vision, class rejoinder, vigilante of bourgeois incontinence.
Shame-faced I have fled cheerful public houses and desolate suburban trains, legging it through twilit council estates with their lurking bovver boys.
Just last week he resurfaced in my local as I was discoursing on Oxford’s traffic. One word too many and he pounced.
‘Turn the volume down mate.’
I was forced out to meet a grisly fate. I now drink craft ale in the Tap Social, adding my voice to the ring-road drone of its hipster regulars.
SONNET FOR A MEME
How is it a sudden meme from all the millions
can stop you as she looks into a future now
past the scratching grass behind someone
who wants to catch this moment that’s
gone plus maybe the girl and people
stopping just to blink in the sun
blinding them so better not think
too much when you’ve yourself
lost all those pictures or couldn’t
look at them if you hadn’t though
perhaps it was planned that way
then happens the same to everyone -
you can only feel it for you -
what is impossible to say.
Lots to enjoy here, Paul. “A few made the mistake of moving to Cinderford”…lol
Hello Paul - really liked some of these - I expect you can guess which ones! Should write an email to you instead - things have been tricky recently (for the last year!)
Lawrence