Thursday 26 December 2013

Rural poverty


Don’t bang on over what’s not fair
I’ve ditched the Volvo for a hatch
We’re down to only one au pair
There’s something mouldy in the thatch
It’s hell in Chipping Sodbury
The hardships of our Cotswolds life
The day-to-day indignity
Have made a martyr of my wife
The pinch of rural poverty
Is written on her face, the fear
Of scrimping to pay stable fees
There’ll be no skiing trip this year!
She squabbles with the Aga louts
Fighting over cut price sprouts

Saturday 14 December 2013

Old Kent Road

        

for Sara


They are tearing down the fire station
Cubes are laced across a churned up field
Soon it will be a glittering cave of light
At least the common cannot be defiled
I have seen its grass sea whitened with frost
We yearn for natural light, weather
And seek to re-capture what is lost
In Oak Furniture Land, World of Leather
Once this road passed through an ancient forest
Always, the green wood pushes through
The new furniture is temporary at best
I pass the fire station thinking how you
Would see a maypole, a druid at the bus stop
Soon there will be a new place to shop

Wednesday 4 December 2013

A public house in south-east London

It is like of an old Wild West saloon –
memories of laughter and fights
are pushed into its shadows.
Its patrons lived mainly at night.
They are gone, but their tales and songs
seem congealed in the deep brown varnish.
The boom times ended; the world moved on
leaving only the lonely and damaged
tarnished cups, a broken-down piano.
Hooded like death in a grey cowl
the scrawny man who no-one talks to
sits alone in the dark on his bar stool
Penge Pete. No-one can beat him on the drop
between Cash Converters and the pound shop.