Hay Hill – South Audley
Street & Pall Mall – & a
few others like Bond St
[& Haymarket] – there a
sped mastery of routes
in vans & cars & cabs &
trucks – west out fastest
past Talgarth Road’s art
studios/ We drove – as if
our short lives no longer
mattered to us – Gatso’s
box of camera tricks not
yet set to capture us [not
then]/ I did Nelson’s – &
then up Pall Mall – a slid
right [past royal gardens]
as princes spied – envious
of our driven days/ Those
Sundays through London
were quicker last century
Tag: driving
Driving Lessons
A car ahead of me
clipped a pigeon
which spun upwards
in recoiled flight –
it exploded
showing pink flesh
where belly feathers
were plucked
and then blown by
confetti’s law of dispersion
My father instructed me
in his squeezed art
of sporting kindness
after his blasting –
often winging –
grain-gorged vermin
My air rifle’s muzzle
there – softly planted –
then – a lead pellet
for a quick death
There was time to turn
my steering wheel
and put my nearside tyres
correctly in line
with what remained –
what moved –
what was once a bird –
off my racing line
to feel a hard – then a soft
hump of tyres and death
Slower
I choose a minutes slower
route within Google Maps
Such a lottery takes us longer
as we drive through mid-Sussex
Huge delays are common here –
because J.Deere tractors blast
along summer’s uncut lanes –
that narrowing of back roads –
fuming in their camouflage
of brand green and yellow –
ploughing dead straight –
making cars meet hedgerows
We hit dry spittles of sunlight
under jiggered shadows –
Here old wapple ways
are low to fields – almost-gorges
hoofed out by tramped centuries
of stick-herded stock
Where canopies intersect overhead
as prayer-grabbing fingers lock
to make summertime rooflines
under which we drive in instant night –
swooped – whilst our confines
of air-conditioning and auto-beams
make us – modern travellers – immune
to such a cool pleasure as shade
The Last Corner
First an eye-crash –
that was the quick blindness
which I slammed into –
it enveloped me under
a tugged-at gallows hood
as I ferried our slumped
kids through their unsettled fears
of the dark – a risen thing
with the hour’s rainfall
which spat – then gobbed
across the lane’s shifts –
springing like shone frogs –
a slimy tide of refraction
down the switch – on and off –
of the unintended chicane –
set by claws of branches
and lumpen road kill
in that true – truest black –
I drove under the storm
that had redacted all colour
from my high beam view
of the tongue-wet road –
that horror film palette
of some evil and of some good –
in stretched marks to bends –
in white lines which warned
of the too-tightness
of that last slip away camber
This Older Driver
I want our lowering sun to burn
for a much – much – longer last hour –
or more – and brighter than now
I do not want to be driving
on those sunken country roads
into the skulk of dusk’s gloom –
and then turned back through black
I wish to see clearly tonight where
the patch of tarmac starts and ends
on the threaded bends and turns –
without the switch of dipped lights
or the blinding others’ high beams –
they set me to groping
as a blind man gropes
I’ll weave between the unseen deer