Jon Stocks
The Six-Thirty for St Pancras
London lays waiting at the end of the line
Seething with metropolitan passion
Under cloudless sky’s this hot June day
Imagine it humming like a locust swarm
Shimmering wildly under ozone
Leaking dreams into the stratosphere.
London’s words flow and flood with the river
Inundating bookshops and libraries
I ponder the latest emissions
The no mans land of St Pancras station
Less than an hour away as the wine flows
London imagined seems just as real.
When I travelled south with the anarchists
From Manchester with righteous anger
Our knives sharpened for the Thatcher boys
Then I hated London with a mission
The proletarian toadying Tories
The drab pomposity of royalty
Slick bankers smug in their easy vice.
I couldn’t love London until it called
Inviting my time to read and talk
Until it put me up in smart hotels
And I began to feel it wanted me
But now it’s love unconditional
For chaos and deconstruction
The capital’s chameleon smile.
Alicia's Diary
Meet me and I shall know you, light and shadow,
A formless, fantastic distillation,
Confection of smoke and fogs and gaslight.
Meet me and I’ll watch you as you wander,
Dreamily up pea-souped side streets,
Long neck hidden by black buttoned collar,
Your exhaled breath, a ghostly miasma,
Drifting past the clanking city tram-cars,
The news boy who teases you, calling out your name.
Meet me on Fargate, waiting at Cole’s corner,
Top hat and tailed, tapping with my cane.
Yours for all eternity my darling,
Yours beyond the final cutting edge of time.
Late for your theatre tea, warm hands wrapped in velvet,
Hat pulled down over your pert, pink ears.
Your diary shows me all your sweet conceits,
And makes me long to hold you, snug as the grave.
Absinthe on Black Hill
And this is how my consciousness
On moor land alone, light fading fast
Absinthe and an absence of you
Stirs in me like a distant memory
Of another life, a different world
With other moons and far distant stars
And hums with strange exaltations
Insights beyond articulation
A dream autism more strangely real
Than this little box of space and time.
And this is how my consciousness
Soars beyond the days pedantry
Feeding on a tang of cooling air
The subtle change of light into dusk
Sorcery at the edge of night
Absorbing elusive mysteries
That you can only know and feel
And sense and never remember
A world beyond the bubble of mind.
©2006 by Jon Stocks
