Moving Around
My first years back in London
were spent moving around
from high on the hill to the valley
where I had drunk with you
walking streets once known
now overgrown with writing
composed like greased lightning
but I never found you again.
I found the hard shoulder
instead, to cry on, a room with a torn
condom packet under the bed;
in my sock drawer, I kept dread.
On the way out of the station
a solemn little demonstration
of silent schoolchildren stepped
between guardian police cars.
Poor mites, they were in the gun wars,
I was in a pensionable job
where bullets were in the eyes
of ladies who couldn’t read or write.
Power-seeking missiles overhead
grazed the skies of far away Iraq.
Some people blew up a tube train
and the top off a double-deck.
Londoners stepped out to mourn.
We were kept underground
allowed only to keep silence
in that basement of cultural norms.
My plight was light, I floated
due North, into a nice little flat
between too many food outlets
and a place with the internet.
There’s a quiet phone by my bed.
I am a quarantined survivor
a bug in a rug. I am snug
in a way, but I still know inside
there is nowhere much left to hide
only a place you can’t forget,
your past unravelling like a dream
of mistakes you make in a life.
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