I live in the bottom of a tea-cup,
the basin of an English town
that is no more remarkable than any other English town.
It has little flair,
too much submissiveness,
many characters but no character.
It is a stencilled town convinced that it is something more
than margins.

Front gardens are filled with bits and pieces
of broken things
that are perpetually leaving.
Cardboard boxes,
disconnected fridges,
unfinished patios,
wellingtons that have paused to collect the clouds.
The crocuses have frostbite
and the lawns are fraying at the edges
like muddy carpet.
As you follow the road the houses get bigger
and their front doors get shabbier.
Paint peels like sunburnt skin
and the road stains yellow.

The old and the new mix obscenely;
two girls, tied at the elbow,
crack their feet on the sound
of their sisters’ high heels slapping paving stones.
Most people have got extensions
that have left their house in two pieces,
the bricks never seeming to meet.
Gingham table cloths hang out to dry,
a red double-decker teeters on a corner,
biked teenagers slip through the net of the Friday sky.

It’s a green-ish evening
and the clouds are strung like DNA blots
around the blurring sun.
The light’s not strong enough to dry your bones but,
when you look at it,
it seems to have exceeded any outline.
A slab of sky is golden.

The allotment is rows upon rows upon rows of bamboo canes,
browned like apple cores.
Chicken wire and faded Wendy houses
slouch upon their soil trenches.
It is a patchwork of mediocrity;
the beige and the brown and the grey
overtake the green.
Tin cans stud the place
like piercings on the body of an ex-punk;
only dead things grow
and the colours have been switched to mute.

There’s a market on Saturdays
where strawberries will cost you the moon
and where egg boxes are recycled
until they drip in the rain.
My grandparents remember my town in its embyonic stages,
my parents remember when it still was framed with local business,
I remember it when Shakeaway was a fruit and vegetable store
that sold palenta on Wednesdays.
My town is locked in a cycle of self-improvement
that it never seems to benefit from.
It is infitely greyed
and nothing more or less than ordinary.
Boys with blackheads pretend that they understand parkour
and the haberdashery closes down.
Each month, the window displays alter to no avail
and the dust sinks a little closer
to the pages we’re constantly trying to turn.

I live in the bottom of a tea-cup
and I never stop trying to read insubstantial fortunes
from the dregs I’ve left behind.