Wednesday 30 December 2015

Poem: 'AN INDUSTRIAL ROMANCE'


AN INDUSTRIAL ROMANCE/ 
CLOCK DVA AT THE ‘F’-CLUB 
               (Leeds, 24 February 1980) 


strobe
white lines on black
throb of inset
luminous symbols/green
in tape machine

sax shreds Coltrane
thrashing cracks in air
with spatial/temporal
dislocations

now me, 3 decades on,
longevity as accumulation
of experience, wisdom,
long-toothed, raggy bearded &
redolent of guru-like beatitude,
or just gradual deterioration
into senile mumblings,
bleary-eyed with glaucomatous
hung-over antiquity

lacerated by
ironic curtains
of concrete noise

they told me
fluoride grows strong white synapses,
so how come I still wake up
screaming for gipsy visions?
been adolescent 30-yrs
& still dream of finding
the Enchanted Ring-Pull Tab…

outside these walls
industrial romances are
being consummated in the
soft-focus drizzle of
fluoridated rain

in here there are
strobe-storms of
repetitive verticals,
in corridors of
diminishing
mirror images


Collage by Steve Sneyd

 Published in:
‘SEPIA no.16’ (UK – November 1981)
‘POSITIVE TOUCH no.2’ (UK – June 1982)
‘STINK no.1’ (UK – April 1984)

1 comment:

Judas Vigilante said...

Love this Andrew, Am I right in that you wrote this many years ago. God, such foresight. I'm 41 in a few weeks and this poems sums up how I feel a lot of the time!
Have a brilliant 2016.

Paul