I climb in the downhill breath of the wind
to a glade that peeps over London,
a fat expanse of London,
thanking God or something I can still see the comely
nipple of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.
It’s a loving distance from the steel
cucumbers and baguettes around which
cramped clients rumble forward,
bloated buses inch gurgling forward
across the protruding midriff I’ve broken from
to watch dawdling boats and unshackled spaniels,
to muddy my boots and feel molehills under them,
to smell honeysuckle or whatever it is,
to hear ice-cream vans instead of sirens,
though I can still hear sirens.
I remember one night down there
smoking weed with my old chum Terry,
on guard for uniform.
I panicked, he threw the joint away,
but it was only an ice-cream van.
That became our phrase for a police van,
replacing ‘meat wagon’.
And police weren’t rozzers anymore.
They were rossis.
I descend again this pretty little nose of a hill
and walk through the copse,
the moist abundant copse,
my back towards the gastritis.
