Monday 11 June 2012

Bus notes 5


        There’d been too many coffees
        and the blood went at a rate.
Talking with Dad before: 
it was words heard wrong, 
the working hurts, a smashed up house.
        Some bloke by the doors
        was kicking out a foot
        with paper stuck to it.
The dirty water slid across the floor.
        We passed the Oratory
        and the lights were out
        and no one crossed themselves
        and everything was still
        in the light and the waiting.
I said in a too loud voice,
we’re all going the same way.
        The whole of the lower deck
        shut up quick and turned
        to look at the thin rain
        start to repeat itself.

6 comments:

  1. All the impossible immoveable wrongness of the world suddenly comes right for a moment when there is a poem as good as this one to answer back to it.

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  2. Thank you, TC

    While I do enjoy writing this series, it's getting harder to draw each one to some kind of finish or at least to lay off the work. The movement of feeling here was strange to me.

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  3. Well, it feels from here as though the thing led itself. Thin rain as well as wind will blow where it listeth, often it listeth to repeat itself.

    (One takes -- in a good way -- the endings of these last two poems as being about repetition. It is in and about the ring dance of the brain's pattern recognition Graces that a poem often begins; one would reckon they are only well pleased by being honoured so.)

    The Dad and the wrong and the before and the dark Oratory are like submerged anchors clocked in dirty water and kelp. One thinks of the darknesses in the forest into which falls the Country Priest in the Bresson film.

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  4. The dirty water was something to see. The weather had been atrocious and there was a good 3 inches to this shifting slick. A vision set aside for those on the wrong side of the average wage.

    I guess the vain hope - which couldn't figure in this piece - is that something might emerge from that grey soup.

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  5. We had been reading about the flooding in Wales. When the weather is foul it is common folk who suffer most, if only in inconvenience. In this country the definition of a Republican is somebody who has neither been on a bus nor out in the rain. At any time.

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