Paul Sutton

To thoughts

You’re a sly one. Chipping away, not letting go –
this edifice being created is you.

A bastard worth stamping out in
crescendos of boots and tumbling.

Show me how sensitive you are –
I itch for enlightenment.

I see you now; a thwarted sod.
Always remember it should have been different.

My memory is of moon-clipped streets,
at a time when people combust.

Use so few words to give a dagger or thrown brick –
one night I collapsed.

Now I can’t pass a skip without looking in.
Nor a launderette.

Terrible the heat in summer.
Comfort in the ionic smells;
soap towns of the “blind North”?
I know to avoid such places.

Heave on boys.
Who will buy?
Nancy bludgeoned but ok
living past the North Circular, her
secondary education relied on “Oliver!”
backstage 1978 (Fagin’s gang)
my first sight of tits in
the matchgirls’ dresses –
Comprehensive ideals –
workhouse and phossy jaw
productions with songs still singing
(the town was Welwyn Garden City)
oh the council housing on warm evenings
when lovers promenade over pavements
so many underpasses and girls after flares
the precinct gangs – Shoplands’ and Harlands’
“boot boys” – I return every year to get
my tyres fixed (titular now, I insist on it)
revisiting the sight of an illumination into
the world of yobs and pokery, apparently
the town is drugs and idealism concocted
for Crimewatch. I don’t remember such
just swoony warmth of summer smokers
walking over school fields to oak trees
I watched unaware of the cancers coming
they also. Such hair those days of blowdrying
the orange and brown generation in candlewick,
good times I think.

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