The journey home 5
It is some time after midnight outside Morden underground station. A man is leaning against the edge of a littered bus shelter. He is sweaty and sweat-stained from energetic performance of a lengthy poem in a crowded music space. He thinks he wants to be alone. He thinks his bus is late. In his head, there starts to play a forty year old American pop song.
A young white man approaches without steadiness and asks: "You waiting for a bus?". The older man agrees.
The young man asks: "Where's it go?"
The would be misanthrope replies: "West Croydon."
The young man looks confused and asks: "Where?"
The misanthropic poet wants to help him: "Sutton, north Sutton that is, then Carshalton, then Roundshaw, then Croydon; there it stops; it's the last one till dawn." The young man says nothing, so the sweaty misanthrope adds: "It's about six miles."
The young man seems bewildered now: "Where's Tottenham then?"
The poet says "North London."
The young man says: " I know that! Where am I?"
The tired misanthropic sweaty poet says "South London", which he has crossed and re-crossed, like a fly upon an interesting surface, for half a century, and his parents before him and their parents before them.
The young man says "No!"
The poet says "Almost not South London. It's the edge of London." Pedagogical tone.
The young man shouts, quietly: "Right!"
It occurs to the poet, irrelevantly, that perhaps we are all immortal.
"Up there," he says to the young man, pointing over the other's shoulder with his forehead, he is too tired to lift his arms, "a couple of miles, is the boundary of Greater London." How many, apart from me, care? he wonders. He wonders: Do I care?
The young man shouts audibly: "Oh fuck that!"
The poet thinks: Where is my bus? And he tries to pass on the secure fortitude he yet feels: "'fraid so. You're at the southern end of the Northern Line." He's known it for over forty years.
The young man asks: "How do I get to Tottenham?"
The old grubby poet should say he is not at all clear, being a South Londoner. He should say that, when he faces such problems himself, he usually gets it wrong. He says: "You could get this bus I'm waiting for to the terminus" - but he doesn't want this company - "walk from where it stops to East Croydon and get a train to Victoria... if there is one." He thinks he knows there isn't; and it may be safer here than in Croydon. Here the police leave you alone, sometimes.
He should be in bed. he doesn't want this waking up. Go away, he thinks.
The young man says: "Fuck that!"
"Or go over there," says the wary poet, "and get an N155 to the Aldwych."
This is good advice, or would have been if the latest N155 had not just departed. "The trouble is," he adds, "I just saw one go." The young man doesn't take it in. They are neither of them mentally fully functional. The young man asks: "Where's that go?"
The sweaty poet answers: "Aldwych.", sounding knowledgeable. He saw it on the front of the bus. "Get off at Trafalgar Square."
The young man says: "Fuck that!" He says: "I want to have a wank." He says: "At home."
Two separate and complementary contradictory desires. The poet understands. Don't we all desire like that? he thinks Only two hours ago someone asked him: "If you perform like that all the time, how do you have any energy to masturbate... I mean, if you perform like that, not many people are going to want to have sex with you." He thought then: I don't want to have sex with many of them. He thought: You know where you are with masturbation. He did not answer. He thought: Why have you been so upset by my performance that you come and say this to me? He did not speak.
"I want to have a wank," says the young man again; and he walks out to the middle of the road and begins to mime a caricature of rapid masturbation on a two foot air erection. Two small men, possibly Tamil, seem to appear, and then they run up to him, grab him and tell him he is an idiot. He says: "Hi! Where have you been?"
They drag him away in a frog-march with which he co-operates.
He reappears on the other side of the road. Behind him, in darkness, is the poet's bus. It is overdue. Its lights are out but its driver's seat is occupied. Perhaps a driver has found his own solitude in which to gain some physical solace on his own.
A large black man, quite young, dressed in a huge jacket despite the July heat, tells the young man, loudly, to fuck off, but he is walking away at the same time.
A police car cruises by slowly, the occupants looking out, attentive like owls, but without a sign of hunger. They wouldn't know how to fly.
The poet thinks that once he might have known, if he had concentrated. Now it seems to him that he prefers the ground. He has to be somewhere, he supposes.
hills play blind man's buff with humans
crouching suddenly standing up
changing places taking us pig-a-back
even in daylight, brains are lost
stones aren't clever, but they're cunning
and, darkly, every one sightless
so we stumble, tricked and muddled
Far away
a couple skip down the strand edge,
she in the water, he on the beach
a dog runs
between, slightly ahead,
beside ocean circumference
she steps a curve
most similar to my lover's breast
while the dog jumps at each sucking wave
logan moon
a big moon lolls over the horizon
vibrant as gyroscopes
poised as wire athletes
affronting a gauze dark
and flashy
a cat moves away, streaking
the sky white dashing its fur with gleams
mica star glints roof tenuously
a dog stands on some ground
hesitantly looking about for other beings
the light can surely see us
and there is a hum
but all one hears
is the sea
upon nearby rockiness
and gulls, which chorus
through the floating nights
Lawrence Upton, poet & graphic artist, is
currently writing multimedia pieces with composer John Levack Drever.
Recent work appeared in "Wire Sculptures" (Reality Street, 2003) and "Pictures, Cartoon Strips" (Writers Forum, forthcoming)
http://pages.britishlibrary.net/lawrence.upton;
british electronic poetry centre - http://www.soton.ac.uk/bepc/poets/upton.htm
Myspace - http://www.myspace.com/lawrenceupton
