Camden Town

by Joshua Seigal

We’d walk along the riverbanks, searching
for somewhere to eat and having just spent
twenty pounds on an eighth of oregano from some rasta
who saw two public schoolboys
coming. The sun would descend over London
as we waited for the hours to trickle by so
we could go to some party, and we
would idle in the market, me picking out a suede-jacket
going cheap, and you bohemian with your waistcoat
and knitted cardie, and we would scab a skin
from a twentysomething on the bench and crumble
the remains of our green inside. We’d sit
silently at the river, glazed-eyed, and watch
the roach drift away down the lock, or a casual couple
giving us a knowing grin, and we’d expound
the virtues of Ezra Pound, or libertarianism,
or whatever else was going round, and you’d tell me
about On the Road and I’d tell you about some band
I’d found in a second-hand record store.

We’d tell ourselves that these are the days, and that
we’d never have a problem if our children smoked
weed or expressed individuality in various ways
with lip-piercings or tattoos – we convinced ourselves
that we were The Revolution, and we’d discuss the latest news
on the effects of hemp, and how best to grow it
in your mother’s wardrobe.
Still some hours to shoot from the sky like ducks: we’d try
that legal shit from the Mexican at that stall,
and we’d go back to the river and it would maul our throats
‘like being raped in the mouth with a knife’ (you said).
This was life. This was the antithesis of respectable society; this
was the sledgehammer with which to smash its edifice.
This was the future. Now I go there as a tourist – with
a faint smirk at all the miniature figurines
of rebellion. I don’t know where you are now, whether
you’re reading Burroughs in an opium-haze, or in prison,
or if you just spend your days behind a computer
in a suit, now that the London smog has risen.

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~ This piece was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 and was filed under Writing, Poetry. You can make comments on it below. ~