Watching cars drive by.

[JamesG]

Not too sure about the title, but I think this isn't too bad. What do ya think? Cars with those names were very common in the UK in the seventies.



Watching cars drive by.


It was a very Seventies light.
The trees wore it like a mantle,
a hint, a tint, of Naples yellow,
a yellow like painted honey.

A car drove by, as cars are wont to do,
an old car, though this century,
not the old that I remember,
the cars of my dreaming.
Allegro, Grenada, Fiesta, Capri,
exotically suggestive,
unreliable, constructed from
tin, hope, and disappointment,
you used to say,
when you were still here to say it.

I sat and watched other cars go by,
on a bench between
two unhappy trees
that clung on to the
side of the smoky tarmac,
held up by desperate grass
and angry weeds.
Chipping at the peeling paint
with my ink-stained fingers,
revealing the old wood
hidden underneath.

Chipping, chipping,
till my fingers bled and
I had to pick out the
ancient paint that lodged
there like jewelled insects,
desperate to burrow
into the meat of my fingers.

The cars kept driving by,
as they are wont to do,
low sunlight slipping
over quivering metal skin,
in that Seventies afternoon light.
Accidents waiting to happen,
you used to say,
when you were still here to say it.