Class Apart

Joe also knew intuitively
That these new visitors
Wouldn’t be like the wealthy tourists of old

Those selfish transitory leisure classes
Who came here simply to be served
Who came here for their pampered egos

To be preserved in aspic
With no care for those who served them
They were well prepared, happy

Happy to move on
To move swiftly on...

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Involvement

Joe saw energy in the town
A youthful vibrant energy
An energy that his village had lost
Lost so so completely

He turned to his old friends
And said; boys
With what this town’s already got
It’s going to go somewhere

I’ve read the posters
They are asking people
That means you, and me, all of us...

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Urbanisation

Joe thought his village cold and dead
Yet here it is, in our day
A model
For new urban developments

Rural life transposed to commuter land
Villages overlapped with other villages
Developers redeveloping the rural idyll
Building a pastiche of a past life

What is everyone scared of
Why standstill, or worse
Why try to go backwards
Thought Joe

For Joe the town was different...

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Music It Is

In Weatherspoon’s
Joe is alone
His friends have decided not to join him
He sits beside the jukebox

A cold beer
A warm cigarette
A rough-cut shirt
His best biker’s leather jacket

His sharp-cut leather boots
His extravagant belt
With buckles, studs, and trophies
Youth in all of its glory

Fearless, that is until...

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New Winners

Joe thought otherwise
The pub is dead
Just like the chapel is dead
The church is no longer the lifeblood
Or the focus of the community
The church is now devoid of ordinary folk
No more local festivals
No more ever-caring parishioners
Yet still the cold moves in on the church
As so too do the familiar delusions

But Joe’s precious time
Right now
Was away from his cold village
Although it was not
Not too too far away
He walked in the filtered sunlit woods
Wandered aside the splashing streams
He loved the noise of life’s quiet places
He had a pixies touch on the footpaths
He stroked the stone walls

Just as if they were female sculptures
OK there were no longer any potato fields...

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