Saturday 28 July 2012

Bus notes 12

        Moving up Salisbury Road
        with some sunshine showing inside,
        the bus coming out of town
        at this time of morning
        is almost empty.
Strolling down the hill is Carl
with his hair surfeit
and the mere patch of face.
        A medal hangs from his neck
        two days since the games began.
        It serves as an amulet
        warding off those clouds
        of indignant flies
        respectable lungs blow out.
        His perfect ease won't give away
        that secret victory. He keeps it
        in closed, cupped, imagined hands.
We carry on up to the village,
going the wrong way slowly
with nothing as golden to show.

4 comments:

  1. the mere patch of his face...

    I like this a lot.

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  2. The poem itself an amulet of protection against the naff extravaganza of "The Games".

    Let the ersatz techno-commercial-high security Games go unnoticed, let such minor wrong-way lives be seen and celebrated, remembered with respect and held to, as outcroppings of the human amid the sea of glitz and apps and anachronistic nationalism and plastic money.

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  3. Carl has been knocking around Moseley, the district of Birmingham where I grew up, since I was a child. He's always browsing the charity shops looking for fine items of adornment. To catch him that day with the medal on was serendipitous.

    You're right, TC: those minor lives are the human ones.

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