*This December, I am reblogging some of the more popular poems and articles that I have posted in the course of the past year*

The Trip West

(after Guillaume Apollinaire’s La Petite Auto)

We got a smooth ride west on the A44 out of England

and said goodbye to the 80s;

hello to smart missiles, CNN and Saddam Hussein,

scuds, poisons, torture, dirty bombs.

And everyone ringing in on the radio had something to say,

excited by Armageddon and death…

A fish-shop selling grinning shark-soup

*

The dogs of Wales still chase English butt;

gamekeepers carry guns in forests

and speak their own language in local shops.

Toy trains trundle around castles and mountains,

lubed by the blood of ancient ghosts….

Bloated monsters washed up from the Irish Sea

are always ready to explode…

on the fog-bound mountains and hills,

man fighting man,

till star explodes in sky and all bow down in peace.

Chapels empty but always open,

as the faithful drunk-drive themselves

to church, home from bars.

Our hearts beat deftly to the beat of an alien motor.

We hotrod a new universe into being:

one of supermarkets & department stores.

Dumb masses of souls

drive past beggars & barking dogs

on the way to malls.

*

I will never forget that night drive:

that sad farewell to home,

bathed by the light of postwar stars;

sister tucked up in an embroidered blanket

hogging the back seat;

little villages with their carefully-tended war-memorial crosses

passing by; black as witchery against the moonlight;

insomnia; watching the stars circle round the Dog Star

between dusk and dawn in a car

parked illegally up some farmer’s lane;

cows lowing and moaning in a shadowed field;

dashboard lights dimmed;

coffee in plastic orange mugs;

jacking the old car up and changing a tire

in the pixie mist of a crisp farmland dawn.

 

Mid-day saw us in Oxford.

The Sun had declared war on striking miners.

We arrived tired in a flashy new world already jaded and old.