A28 and Surrounds
When hunched in truck cabs, teamed
roofers
Belt around beltways, lace the skirts
of
An ex-dissenting land, now neutered;
Determined that, "Long hours
make you worse off."
In bold font they bear the legend
"Pride's Roofs" and strafe
the roads
For a catch, cross the lines on the
bend,
Solid ways that knot antique abodes.
The old proper mining towns give way to
saplings on new estates;
Engines rumbling around the debacle
Of a premature Xmas Tree topped off with sparkles.
"Oven-Ready Game" and a
dialling code signal the brink of the A-road;
From there we bear upon hedgerows
And car showrooms in battle-mode.
The English road is a known beast,
Neither pretty nor wild, nor
dangerous either.
Arteries of commerce, from most to
least
Pumping seaward on sodden tyres.
Best snapped as a still-life panorama,
Its roads are its class
cross-stitchings,
Catch picture-window dramas
And at bus stops a world of vulgar
etchings.
There are places where, because there
are roads, nobody walks;
Where, sans-papier, in our
quarries of chalk
Turned to bungalow havens, the
remainders labour
Or wait. Where unremembered pathways
Cut away and between the motiveless
brush
Laid over by dozing chestnuts, unseen
in the evening rush.
Time is on its knees
The town clambers up and on its tail
brings
The wrestling waves of a disarrayed
sea;
Swapping between Archer's and harder
things
Heavy-scent teens wait at slot
machines.
Time dusts about in tinkling arcades,
Tickling the dust-flayed men with their
coats
No more, no more to sow their wild oats
With women of indiscernible age.
We leave a wardrobe of pine cones to
dry
On the lime green expanse of a dish
cloth;
An assemblage of autumn, piled to
remind
It's change to which love's hat is
doffed.
Changed to warmed age; browning pines
peel their limbs
Out wide and nestle at the boiler's
feet.
A young man, pizza in hand, awaits a
receipt,
As we trundle past the cats at their
bins.
The land is tested; all the skirmishes
Of a Catholic wind: relentless; deft at
sin;
Cutting the wheat from our shivering
chaff,
Heads hang wherever it's evangelizing.
Divided between meek or horny hearth,
Slick with iron sediment, the
heath-shallows
Maintain in dolorous October tones
The peat bogs that will inherit the
earth.
If Prague is, despite the communism,
A city of jazz, Royal Tunbridge Wells
Has never pandered to any -ism
Nor any music either very well.
We trot gamely round its spangled
Pantiles
The boutiques with a grimace of
fashion;
And the bespectacled of earnest
dispassion
Cup cures for veins they dislike and
their piles.
Half-deceased, a perished world drifts
by,
Remembered not from sandy childhood
But our life's later and more cunning
lie,
Deceived in Kentish depths or Sussex
woods.
Erosion is for rocks the embrace of
time:
We watch their heads in settling lips
of fog,
Our hoarse wheels spitting on the sod,
And gathering pockmarks on bony lime.
When we get home you'll string a
garland up
Made from your time-kissed pine cones
and some beads
In this impermanent collection you'll
Keep in the time and see us through the
freeze.
Nietzsche said, Joys all want
eternities
He's right, to a
degree; love wants time too,
But not from a
fixed superior view:
Love would rather
get it on its knees.
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