Saturday 10 November 2012

Bus note 27

        Look through the windows, fogged up
        - with the breathing? - and smeared,
to a letterbox in clouds with sunbeams
sickly eking through a non-blessing.
        Next to me the man with headphones, comical-sized.
        What seeps sounds for a moment like Archie Shepp
but soon gives way to the ordinary and official.
        An extra yearning to taste snowflakes of grace
        is chasing all good gifts out of the moving box.
In the head: A says, I've lost the Sp'rit of Truth,
and B says, Where did you last have it?
        The sequence is usual today
and you can count this time's robotic pulse very easily.
        Something would have the measure of me, I'm afraid.

7 comments:

  1. An extra yearning to taste snowflakes of grace
    is chasing all good gifts out of the moving box.

    Fabulous lines, great poem.

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  2. Given the chance, I shall always echo the Chant.

    Doing badly on the buses of late myself, dispiritedly losing the plot, no grace, habitual exhaustion, routinely late, lost all my little money 'tother night, after fiddling with my three wee plastic bags of fare coins, left them on the seat, hobbled back to the stop in the dead chill of a lost planet, thinking to intercept the bus on its last run, it came, driver said, Sorry man, that bus went out of service.

    (Resolved then never to leave the house again, though there is talk of the house going the way of that last late bus.)

    Lovely to hear the strains of Archie Shepp in the mind's ear, after all these blurred epochs, even if merely imagined. The ordinary and the official (le barbarie) have chased the fox out of the box forever.

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