The Poetry Bus! To Avoid The Congestion Charge, We're Walking!

Who's driving this week? Marion, of Dragonfly's Poetry and Prolixity, and the theme is colour. Did you notice what I did there?

Catch the rainbow of riders here:
http://dragonflyspoetryandprolixity.blogspot.com/

Now I'm not a Londoner, but my father was, and we lived just thirteen miles or so from The Smoke. I Monday to Friday-ed in the heart of the City for school, we shopped there on Saturday mornings and ate there on Saturday nights. Midnight mass on Christmas Eve was Westminster Abbey, every new film was Leicester Square, food meant Fortnum's, and cheese, chemists, cigars, shirts and suits were Jermyn Street.

London is my fascination and where I feel at home. And, er, the prolixity got to me.



Nearly Black

You learn, as a child,
That white is all colours;
Black their absence.
You learn, as a child,
That if you mix all your paints save white
You get, not white, but nearly black.

Nearly black all colours to me city,
Take my eyes and be the colour of this town.

The furniture stores cluster suns:
Harveys, Heals and Habitat
white skulls on bright black granite,
beds of blue sky and strawberry sofas
rest before neon screams of pink and red,
heaven and earth, take time out
for a gentleman’s rhinoceros club
(black and white boys to guard the door)
a navy pinstripe precision man
rifles rubbish outside, old guard,
to find a meal in a yellow box.
Ghost golden gods bestride see-me lights,
gaudy girls below, who talk and text and tweet together
whilst the yellow Labrador plays
with the red and white McDonald’s box
on his paradise walk.
A soft pastel detour is a single turn;
here is Cornelissen, pure paint glass bottles
of mineral colours so perfect they must be
held aspic inviolate
by the green store with the gilded name,
and on a cream wall in a black box live the Beauclerks
beside pubs who glow glorious sunset,
make you want to walk up, walk in
and bathe in light and brown beer and banter boys.
But save your self for the black hulk
of the repository of what we ever are,
man the maker, and this his best museum,
with its pawn-broker lights, you may ever see.
Trade Union House is dull iron-grey,
but the antiquaries are a grille-riot
of book and colour and coin;
blue plaques abound with the bikes
in regiment rows of silver, blue, black
and the yellow Labrador plays on.
The electrical shops are harsh-lit ugly
and I do not like their typeface
but good times are this way
where the girls beckon you to siren call,
autopsy-lit like the recently dead.
Marilyn lives upstairs, black and white
and another pub’s sunset hails me again
Come in from that pavement to the last
of the warmth and the whiskey hail fellow well met
but walk on, for the American Church
is blood-red, the casino sand-yellow,
dianetics in between, the hospital infected
with greying people on drips sitting for a smoke
in washed-out wheelchairs beneath white-coated steel.

And the signs are green and red
And go and stop underground
And skin is green and rubber
And skin is all colours
And the tattooed man is nearly black.

I wear this city on the inside, mix my colours
For it is nearly black as me.

And just in case you thought I had imagination, this is a stroll I took after a very long day at work in London last month that had left with me a cracking headache and a need for air and solitutde. Midnight in the city, Tottenham Court Road, Great Russell Street and a little bit of Euston Road.