Poem

Archway Menace

I understand the complaint
of this road
whose course is ever blackened
with a rubber flux.
From my window I sit and smoke
with the traffic;
all of us are fuming, a dirty exhaust.

The noise never stops.
It disturbs a girder of sunlight
that marks morning,
coming in through the curtains
like broken glass.
Out on the pavement,
commuters rush for transport,
their brows furrowed as washboards with the fuss of it.
The dirty eyes of shopfronts
grieve at their keepers
who forget the thrum of tyres
as though a neighbour’s record.
Windows line the road
like a game of stares.

We are never dulled
by the road’s faithful torment.
Buses throb at stops
as takeaway boys practise breast-talk,
waiting for their shavings
from a rotating limb of meat.
Bourgeois mothers
squawk against the din;
their children hang from pouches shaped like Africa.

I see this
small piece of city from a room.
No more than curbs
tinselled with machine debris,
sallow rooftops, the variable
black tip of Highgate wood.
At night the road sags
as sirens spit their vitriol,
and a habit of eager cars compete with villains of the screen.
Once it disturbed slumber
with an assault of wheel and horn.
Now it pushes sleep
like a mechanical shore.

Jennifer Thompson
London, England

Jennifer Thompson is a bookseller in London.

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