Saturday 10 May 2014

Till Lime Street

Why pearls on the bobble hat

Not God in empty trick green fields

Not Nature fenced

Why girl with sharp axe face hair thinning

Run of mutilated trees goes into town

Corn stubble itches in treacle heat

Black beams crisscross

Patches of before

This solvent head place isn't easy

Neither there nor here

Fishing huts about the square dull pond

Runcorn bridge in vanishing ink

Up from mildewed dream blinking

A tree is ivy eaten to alone

Moldering sleepers pile

Woman thumbs her everyday words

Nowhere without strings of electricity

Until chosen space heroic over

A beautiful Birkenhead girl waiting here

The whole city kisses us hello


6 comments:

  1. I like the venturing out into another city as complicated and interesting as your own -- the distance created by a degree of "outsider"-hood changes the perspective.

    Merseyside has to be its own universe, still. I see where the kids have geared up from sniffing common glue to sniffing the more pricey chemical solvents used to clean automobile wheels. Upscale, the way of the world, euphoria today (a denial of poverty anyway), termination tomorrow.

    But not till after Citeh falls, on the day...

    And in any case, headful of industrial chemicals or no, You'll Never Walk Alone.

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  2. wow !!! just read it could feel the journey u were writing about and loved the ending !!!! off to get some tissues xxxx

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  3. It's a great city; the heart always jumps a little when we're coming in.

    The solvents have never gone out of fashion.

    You know the words.

    Lou, seeing that it's you at the end, what's not to love.

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  4. ... and haven't we at some time conversed about the wondrous Terence Davies hymn to Time and the City... -- or am I imagining that?

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  5. No, you're not imagining it.

    Davies is incomparable and that sequence is perhaps the most beautiful in a beautiful film. I love the moment where the children can be heard singing alongside Gheorgiu.

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