Saturday 14 December 2013

Bus note 83

One obscene yellow splintered eye
in ferris wheel.
        Over the road
        Bolton, Murdoch and Watt
        in one gold skin
study fat paper plans.
        Broad Street comes up
        running to boring violence
and piss streams meander
in thin almost elegant lines.

3 comments:

  1. The histories of the old industries ought to engage us, if only because their products were at least palpable, and existed in the physical universe (if sometimes to the detriment of that universe, but still -- just saying).

    Your recent commenter who suggested these Notes might do well as bus placards was on to something, methinks.

    Indeed your city buses are so far superior to ours in every way as to render comparison not only odious but irrelevant.

    Here they've again raised the (already high) fares, while gradually replacing the old standard model buses with "Fuel Cell" models which have the curious feature of not permitting the "operator" (formerly known as driver) to know the fuel status of his/her bus.

    Outcome: breakdowns, evacuations, tow-aways on an infuriatingly frequent basis.

    While on the other hand... or I should say, in my other hand, as I huddle here in the mid of night at the shrine... is the bloody BEAUTeous green-and-yellow west Midlands Outer Circle Route #11 scale model, which will never break down and always be on time, because God wills it.

    And God is Great.

    Still... to stagger back uphill toward the ostensible point of all this...

    My proposal: that the thin elegant lines of one of these Notes be, in a benign covert nocturnal urban improvement project, etched into the golden tablet of the Golden Boys, in place of the present arcane carpet design.

    "And so I sez, 'Damn your eyes, sir, the stop will be located HERE -- because I say so!"

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  2. That's one of the wonderful things about losing your sight, the lovely blue paint on the Visionhire bus looks green... until it is parked directly beneath the votive candle... and then things become a bit clearer... a mercy, but perhaps passing... aren't all the mercies that way, after a while... not of course to gainsay the brilliance of them... no, not that, ever!

    Obscenity and violence, by the by -- so very boring. And can we truly say there are less of those things about at present, than in the days of Messrs B. W and M (pre-gilding)?

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  3. The Outer Circle stands in way of a city wall. Always been a magical service to my mind.

    Given the state of Birmingham City Council's finances I do fear for the buses. There's a lot of local government money going in. Best enjoy it while we can..

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