Poem 185

The motorway extension and redevelopment of upper Cuba St was in the wind so long it seemed simultaneously like nothing was happening and everything was changing, years of liminality, ghosts of the present and ghosts of the future overlaid …

( the last line is a play on Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh … )

Renewal

Up Cuba Street into the sunset
        you can see how the entrails are going to hang
        so neatly in the teeth
        you can see the pot plants coming south
        the blueprints making footprints

what's going to happen to Mr. Smiles
where will NORML go to mastermind
the drawing-room dope society of tomorrow?

        early evening Friday I'm dodging down the fish shop
        breeze up Cuba by the butchers and the Chinese
        greengrocers the empty mirrors where the Presbyterian
        shop was the painted-out People's Palace
               (some kind of South African Bamboo Bar now
                 selling cocktails to lapsed Catholics)
        the sex shop with its chest-high batwing doors
        Mandy's secondhand fur diamanté sheath fetishistic
        bead store by the restored woodgrain one-owner-only
        tea-trolley emporium
into Silvio's secondhand record merchant
to the nation
                       where I meet Jill every Friday night
yeah like Terry and Julie in Waterloo
                                                          Sunset ...

and out up past
       what's going to happen to the Turkish Kebab place
        to J. Moron the abandoned drapers shop
        to the Salvation Army and the faded window-displays
                        concerning alcohol and the family
what's going to happen to the Korean sailors
in a year will they be fumbling out cash and squid aromas
at flawless receptionists
in pterodactyl-tiled foyers
of Chapman Challenge Chase

                      if in a year
                      Cuba Street’s gone
                      the way
                      of
                      all
                      flash?