TEN SONGS FOR THE '70s

NOT PLACE BUT TIME

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.