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: london
London Sweats
A fan-cooled idle chauffeur
slumps
in his employer’s slick black
double-parked Mercedes
with its engine left running
for working comfort
as it stokes London’s
smoke-free zone
Kensington High Street
puddles
with our fat drops of sweat
See my old man’s back of death-damp –
patches of sweated whisky and beer?
They push me to seek
short-lived shelter
alongside a hundred others
of every nation
in air-conditioned shops
with wide open doors
We all become refugees
with changes in weather
Serpentine Paths
Today wary Canadian geese
avoid paddling screams
from lido-blue rowing boats
finding cooler shade ashore
and rich landed pickings
among flat pressed patches
of lawns below London planes
where an hour’s respite
was snatched
by shade-hungry office bodies
A flaked Royal Parks bench
holds a mother and her boys –
silent with ice cream smiles
Here we share recovery positions
as both boys bum-shuffle
to their right – making an old man’s
space
I see what I will again see later –
strangers’ glances at unknowns
Now at her clothes – her veil
I built this park – in my working days
I planted most of her trees
and laid clean sand for her gallops
I should be able to name
more than London planes
as my known path takes me
to David in Fitzrovia
By Green Park
Day-glo tourists and hoary men –
stiff in their dour ashen suits –
not much has changed
beyond Victoria’s cast arches –
still a Queen and commoners
standoff and watch each other
from behind quick net curtains
and wrought iron barriers
as black cabs and red buses
match those travellers’ hopes
of a London of old curiosities –
with a high price tag to boot
Grenadiers play at army games
but all I see is Spike’s Neddy –
unlike Freddy – parading in heat
under a bear weight of headgear
to guard sweet sperm of kings
in their capital residencies –
where penguin-suited servants
respond to royal commands
whilst we all grovel like a Goon
under that ongoing burden
of keeping up appearances
in our less sumptuous palaces
And my return journey home
through ticket-licking turnstiles –
out beyond a thousand kisses –
is to where Sussex wears green
quite well
Henley Homes in Lambeth
It has now come to pass
children are set aside
before profitable hedges
to maintain London prices
over fixed social housing –
though their adverts stated –
common areas are there
for the use of all.. residents
This split capital sets
poor doors as markers
to keep rare palaces high
and beyond the reach
of most average born kids
Hampstead Heath
We scurried across NW3
but not the low-laid Heath
of bricked-ish village-ness
of idealised introversion –
with loquacious City views
No – We took the buff support
of metre-high teak bars
before the flow of beer taps –
erect like those glass towers
stood in that visible rotten mile
We ripped at the greenery
of London’s low-rooted life
Scarred and weeping skin
from middle-class weekends of
pottering was not ours to wash off
This city is a rubbed scab
which if picked will bleed
from its red core and then fester
until a dry canker kills it off –
Once for all – as the Bible says
We slept with different women
of various sizes and weights
and woke to awkward breaths
and memory loss – some things
are best left on Hampstead Heath
Platform Five & Six
See it
See it
Say it
Say it
Sort it
Sort it
This is a security announcement
This is a security announcement
The next train on this platform
is the 15:41 calling at East Croydon
Gatwick Airport and Three Bridges
Remain behind the yellow line at all times
Remain behind the yellow line at all times
See it
See it
Say it
Say it
Sort it
Sort it
Thursday – Overground to Euston
We travel sober through London Bridge – below
brick arches – on roads cowered by glassy heights –
Our cabbie blasts bent-to-smartphone bodies
back from near-hits on red-man crossings –
it seems that Londoners have now forgotten
how to see the threats beyond their implements –
We now live hand-to-eye – no longer hand-to-mouth –
no shape-to-spoken words – now embedded emojis spout –
We briefly find speed over the river crossing
and then turn left through the gold standard of cheats –
of fund managers – of clerics – of bankers and white Gods –
where every seat and bench in the low sun is arse-taken –
Thursday lunchtime is the dress rehearsal for Friday excess
behind St Paul’s – and in the eateries of Clerkenwell –
in the stained and new cafes – at exotic roadside pop-ups
and in smoke-free pubs until ten o’clock that night –
Our ride is time travel and a belching reminder that
we are in a handcart to hell – instead of the Underground
14th February 2019
Held by a red signal in south London –
in a balloon of wifi – of library silence –
this being a price-hiked compartment –
a restricted remnant of empire days
still served up by rail franchisees
as our ticket collector mis-quotes WS –
Juliet’s soft words as cuffed banter
towards serving staff –
parting is a sweetest sorrow –
and he then regrets these modern times
of –
changes to language – to luv cld b not bad –
Then a roll forward like a sneaking suitor –
an incline takes us without that rumble
from diesel complaints – this carriage sways
over switched points – under lopped trees –
those leaf-spill hazards
alongside a thousand-thousand
other prunings met behind drawn curtains –
those many lovers’ shop-cut flowers
presented in cellophane in south London
on this Saint Valentine’s Day
EDITED 170219
Early Morning at Abbey Mills, c.1928
In memory of Elwin Hawthorne
It must be an early summer
recollection
with the sun so high
on tin roof contours –
before the gauze and filter
of veiled vapours –
settled by less-puddled
watercolours –
The torn foreshore
is a bared cross-section
of London’s tidal visits –
sunken Roman traits –
that wallow of empires’
drowning of ways –
which were then re-built
for the Industrial Age
Mind The Gap
They’ve got a Dead Cupboard
in this Underground station –
hid from swilled passengers –
a Central route to Heaven
Behind those locked doors –
they hide the fresh body –
where the platform-removed
is stored temporarily
There the dropped dead
waits for the official –
to pronounce upon
this stiffened individual
The zipped-up fallen
is bagged – airtight –
he will not be required
to tap his ticket tonight
A Man of the Last Century
You were balanced on a bar stool
balanced on a bar
as ambivelent south Londoners
watched you play guitar –
Tooting had never seen the like before
You ripped down a poster
from the high brick wall
and lugged the trophy back
We found it curled in the hall –
Terminator 2 in Gassiot Road
The wild night you leapt from
bonnets of parked cars
leaving your shoe prints
evidently marked –
the coppers took you in
We poured back pints in the
Whores and Gloom
kidding the tired nurses
we were the gifts in the room –
the Northern Line shook the urinals
The mother of your children came
and took you away
our child removed
to North London’s sober ways –
I have never seen the like again.
The Winchester Goose
He would pay in cowry shells
and barter for love with time
as they exchanged such currency
the lies they laid made lines
She lay outside the liberty
of the clink and London’s wall
reducing down the value of
his late night wide-net hauls
The orders placed by princes
through their messengers and men
took her eyes from their line
and back to Bankside friends
Smog
I enter London
where nature is hated
here potted and placed
left to wilt disgracefully
This skyline is fugged
and bears no majesty
its stone spires smogged
by the smoke-glass travesties
At London Bridge
the train’s lathed wheels
complain on curves
in engineered squeals
Into Charing Cross
from the South Bank
above the dull Thames
and empty cruise boats
I leave the station
to find my black cab
that fuming transport
with it’s poisonous fag
London
I looked up
and suddenly it was London,
the one of terraces
showing their scabby arses
to us,
the London of bent sheds
and blown clothes horses,
of propped bikes and kids’ toys,
and down in the ballast
the litter of a thousand takeaways,
whilst in the distance,
above the patchwork of tiles,
sit the erect spires and dreams
of the ever-dead empire architects,
when God and the trains ran on time.
The Visitor, 1984.
Recall is now grey scale,
but I once dreamt in colour
without any gnaw of limp,
or hint of restricted reach:
back when stiff was good:
And I would wake to this:
Eight AM, clear-road Sunday:
Floored up the A316,
in my stripped-down Landie,
roof-less, screen-dropped,
me, blown, almost removed,
with the doortops off:
I circled, again,
old Trafalgar Square,
to corral, with fumes,
the climb-shined lions,
those I once ascended,
(now boxed snapshots).
I then accelerated
under Admiralty Arch,
to bomb down that drive,
The Mall, a red carpet
of tarmac, on my whirred
agricultural tyres,
fast past the Jacks
of Buckingham Palace,
and then out, away,
to the Home Counties,
where my rough thoughts
took someone else’s wife, again.
MIKE BELL | 10,000 Poems 