EASTBEAT - for peace and non-violence

These days I spend a lot of time cycling along the road from Bow to Stratford. Just past the flyover is a strange in-between area which used to be marshland, then had factories built on it, and now these are being knocked down for hotels and apartment blocks. On a big mobile phone advert along that road I saw the slogan ‘Nothing is Lost’, words oddly out of key with the changing world around it.

At Bow Flyover

When ‘Nothing is Lost’

from the shuttling slats

of mobile ads

over old Bow marsh

hawking the sky

at subliminal cost

to the streaming cars

flowing over the Lee

but all you can find

when the traffic has passed

is the sheer overhang

of derelict ramps

the concrete core

under burned-out lamps

the waterway shrunk

to its oily sump

and the words left unread

their shredded remains

discarded in strips

leaving only the dead

As you go further up the same road you become conscious of a huge empty space opening up on your left, a space of new development, a kind of non-space of the future, which has a strange connection with events taking place earlier this summer on the other side of the world.

One World One Dream

The thing you’re after may lie

just around the bend of the

bird’s nest bubble cube titanium egg

came suddenly from nowhere

into the vast landscape-designed ashtray

with the blue fence just visible

from space now revealed as the portal

of a wormhole to Beijing

I was digging my allotment

when I had a vision

of how the world could be

with a subterranean synapse

tunnelled through to China

emerging this end as an immense

no-go area blasted out the satnav

a blue rimmed hole the size of the horizon

and smack into the middle of this

wasted moonscape beamed from the hole

in the twisted doughnut the sudden

actualisation of what we live for -

seedpods of illusion cosmic

replicants in concrete and steel

stadia of emptiness where we

kowtow to an inscrutable logo

and as we made our way into

the arena lava-flows of fire

were streaming from the nest and force-fields

bouncing around like a yoyo

and in that moment dazzled and

weary we were sucked through the vortex

to the forbidden city to emerge

split-eyed in our immaculate future

This autumn my partner and I spent a few days in Wales, and took the chance to track down the great but sadly little known poet who lives in a little cottage on the edge of the Brecon Beacons; in spite of our turning up as total strangers at his door he kindly invited us in for a cup of tea and a chat about life and poetry.

 

Finding Chris Torrance

Britain’s Got Talent all right

in obscurity waiting to be discovered

like the man cutting grass at M4 Swindon Services

riding his machine over mini-hills unobserved

we speed on past a succession of cameras

primed to flash in automatic recognition

travelling west we catch a whiff

of meadowsweet on the hard shoulder

crossing the Severn we switch to the satnav

entering it mid-air mid-afternoon

with river sea and sky in 3D projection

and 360° orientation

modelled on the latest version

of eon vue 6 infinite

accurate to just a few centimetres

all the way to the horizon

sychronised with the sun we push on

along the Heads of the Valleys Road

cruising flat out over the blackened tops

of opencast scars and disused tips

matching the pace of clouds from the south

funnelling up the Vale of Neath

where the lines intersect we turn off

and touch the ground for the first time

the last half hour is on minor roads

past the last post office the last pub

up into the hills then down into a dale

out of range of coverage of orange

leaving the car for the last half mile

of scrambling along a streambed path

before stumbling out into a trackless field

opening to the sky right off the map

and so we came to a magician’s door

through an arched hedge and a twig gate

which led to a different kind of space

with an electric fire and a sagging roof

and a life condensed to a single hour

of a few words and tea without milk

and we re-emerged to catch the flash

of a solitary raven and a barred sunset

David Amery December 2008