Wednesday 19 December 2012

From New Street to Euston

       Grey surfaces take up a lot of here

          Each clean fuselage lifts up
      above dead Warks scenery

            Shimmer then, white aluminium shell

  cloud drapes folding in and out

               energy noises against grass wildness
                    high up lights dry against soft air

          A shiver       Illegible rabbit faces are
                   near then gone

   Newbuild hamlets are doing
      pastel dream Victorian
                     someway down

         Canley is next now almost becoming Coventry

    gold
    gold and pink stripes
    gold dying off

  I like my new red jumper's heat

           In the seat opposite
         girl unknots her hair
              her attention inattention
            She's not here

         black smoke above conifers holding
               tyre stacks working all about
             a pile of fire

        poplar trees in the raw, picture rhyming

                       flat nowhere as such
                   with scrub clusters showing up      just

        with the odd train smudge
        going out for miles
               

8 comments:

  1. Just for clarity, Warks is a common abbreviation for the County of Warwickshire.

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  2. It is interesting to travel around your landscapes. I like the gold stanza. Thanks.

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  3. Brilliant expansion of the realm of the voyage, moving a bit further out and at the same time -- what with the smoke and smudge you've put in our mind, as recollects of the dark heroic -- also back.

    (Pastel is thus extirpated, at least for the moment of imagination -- if the grass wildness, an attack from another quarter, had not already effectively banned it.)

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  4. Thank you, both.

    It's strange to think that British Rail were still making proper use of steam through to the 1980s.

    There's few pastels I've any time for (with perhaps the exception of this bunch).

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  5. Great song, I do remember, and now you mention it, the name of the group did do a bit to redeem pastel as a concept.

    (No doubting the primary tone in the blood red stigmata on that ceramic Jesus in the video -- vivid enough to make Padre Pio go green with envy -- ouch, Lord!)

    This is another Pastels tune that sticks in the head from that way-back jingly jangly time... echoes of earlier jingle jangles through the decades...

    Puts one in mind of these lads from the same precinct, a bit later -- February 1992, and the rain here then as now, which perhaps triggers the recollection.

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  6. Proper smart pop music. Rain here too and the flood warnings are coming over the radio. Much of Wales again.

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  7. A keen eye and discerning language make for an eye-opening trip--thanks, WB.

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  8. Thank you, Vassilis. Glad you're here for the journey.

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