"civic" poems - Hello Poetry

I wrote a poem on a bus but to hear it you must climb to the top of the bouncing metal stairs. Slither snake-like past the rail and sit on the rainbow nylon bench. I'll be there at the top of the bus, reciting my rhyme, written as we ride along, past shops and houses with musty nets and peeling paint on dingy doors. There's the old woman who lives in a house no bigger than a shoe box who had so many children she didn't know what to do! But they've all grown and flown now and she's all alone with no-one to talk to but herself. Look at that kid: grimy smile and mischievous eyes, skateboard-scuffed knees, darting out from the roadside. Screech! As we stop and angry words. The kid glances back and tosses a vee leaving just his smile behind. The bus lurches on at a snail's pace and stops at a stop for a giggle-girl-gang to chatter up the stairs with a clatter of feet and voices: weekends and boyfriends, music and laughter. The bus trundles and sways past shops all shuttered, old folks gathered by doorways talking about people dead and forgotten ... except by them. Into the town now: a river of road-rage as our bus ambles onward toward car-parks and markets and rat-racing shoppers And stops by a brown pigeon-stained temple of public philanthropy, a gift from a long-dead civic leader and now proud home to dogeared tomes of PC persuasion. Our bus, like some Trojan horse, disgorges its riders who spatter and scatter like rays of dawn light to shop till they drop. So, just me and you seated atop the steel stairway and you say to me sharply, “So where's your poem then?” I look at you strangely: “It's happened around you,” I tell you quite curtly.

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Sep 23, 2012

Sep 23, 2012 at 11:35 AM UTC

thewiccaman

On a Bus

I wrote a poem on a bus but to hear it you must climb to the top of the bouncing metal stairs. Slither snake-like past the rail and sit on the rainbow nylon bench. I'll be there at the top of the bus, reciting my rhyme, written as we ride along, past shops and houses with musty nets and peeling paint on dingy doors. There's the old woman who lives in a house no bigger than a shoe box who had so many children she didn't know what to do! But they've all grown and flown now and she's all alone with no-one to talk to but herself. Look at that kid: grimy smile and mischievous eyes, skateboard-scuffed knees, darting out from the roadside. Screech! As we stop and angry words. The kid glances back and tosses a vee leaving just his smile behind. The bus lurches on at a snail's pace and stops at a stop for a giggle-girl-gang to chatter up the stairs with a clatter of feet and voices: weekends and boyfriends, music and laughter. The bus trundles and sways past shops all shuttered, old folks gathered by doorways talking about people dead and forgotten ... except by them. Into the town now: a river of road-rage as our bus ambles onward toward car-parks and markets and rat-racing shoppers And stops by a brown pigeon-stained temple of public philanthropy, a gift from a long-dead civic leader and now proud home to dogeared tomes of PC persuasion. Our bus, like some Trojan horse, disgorges its riders who spatter and scatter like rays of dawn light to shop till they drop. So, just me and you seated atop the steel stairway and you say to me sharply, “So where's your poem then?” I look at you strangely: “It's happened around you,” I tell you quite curtly.