196 Bus Fiction

Poems & fiction from the bus.

[relatablepoetryandquotes]

“But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going. Sometimes I even go to fun parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don’t care as long as they’re insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone’s happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what? People don’t talk about anything.” - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

[196busfiction]

For Jean & Norman

Glen

Movie star smile.

Rhinestone Cowboy.

The story of you comes to me

Like the white noise through a transistor radio.

I can fill in the gaps.

Crow’s feet.

Good looks.

Wichita Lineman living in

Silver screen Southern Nights.

This ain’t the straight life though.

How many stories

Are reasons to believe

These weren’t just the dreams of the everyday housewife?

I’d build a bridge for you to comeback,

To say My Girl one more time to her.

She talks about offers comin’ over the phone

Words, for crying out loud.

She’s sat there looking at the picture of you,

And I wonder if she’s thinking of those stories,

Pulling, pulling, threading their folklore through her,

Tugging at the centre of her,

Boring, shuddering madly,

Throwing themselves to the lightning,

Slowly fading with time.

To nothing.

-

He still talks to me you know, she said.

I know, I said

[196busfiction]

Haven’t been on the bus for the last month. Been acting. Poems coming your way soon. Hot and fresh.

[196busfiction]

Below The Roar

Half-light is touching everything On the bus back home. The rotten condensation Makes the forms of people Glitter in the sinewy, tangible air Between dusk and night, Accentuating and pronouncing Odd nodules of strangers Listening to air pods, stock still. The middle distance is their focus, These mortal gods: And echoes of passive violence Rent the air like the aftershock Of a sonic boom, deep and resonant And unending… On the deck below A woman is vomiting words Into the silence of the bus Her only objector, the neutral tone Announcing the next stop Which could be Whitechapel. Or Kidbrooke. Or Clapham. The fellow at the back there, He taps in staccato on his phone The dizzying symphony of thought Is now dimmed and slipping away Under Brixton streetlights And the woman opposite Pulls her puffer jacket into herself Like a flower curling into fragile rigor mortis. He looks away and sends a message He shouldn’t have to. ‘Text me when you’re home. Please don’t walk back alone xxx’ He does not know why The chest he breathes out of is tight. The pubs on the A-road Chunter with uneasy murmur, The chink of vessel on veneer The waitress is all lip gloss And glassy eyes at The Wetherspoon. Back here on the bus, The woman is still screaming bloody murder But the top deck is quiet. Her screeching butchers an easy silence. Connections are missed, Like light that has travelled from the sun For a thousand years To settle on fallow ground That no one will see.

[196busfiction]

Notes on Childhood.

They’d grown up in the outer edges of London’s commuter belt on the south coast of England. Large middle-class houses in a predominantly middle-class town were what they began to form their first memories and experiences around. When Tom thought of their childhoods, he thought of hot summer days, sleepovers and video games, family parties, raiding the fridge on midnight feasts and playing war games in the undergrowth of Joe’s garden. They often played at hunting hard-line militants behind the backdrop of the war on terror.

Joe had been brought up in an army household. The stories they were told as children about close calls and gunfights in the Falklands, Northern Ireland and Iraq, whether made up or not, had the feel of something exotic and adventurous about them. They were boys to the core, and their childhood, until their teenage years at least, was a happy one.

In later years, people had told Tom that boys have a switch. One day it’s flipped, and after that things are never the same. One door closes, another opens, but you can never walk back through that first door. Tom and Joe had grown up in a middle-class peace blissful enough to be unaware of this. Still, their mothers had held them tight a split second too long on more than one occasion. They had caught the minute flash of peculiar looks from parents as they played in the garden here and there. They’d endured comments from family members about the speed of their growth for long enough. The knowledge of the march to that first door was wholly unconscious, but it was there, skulking in the shadows in the backs of their minds, waiting to unfurl itself. They were already on that shore, and the tide was rising around them.

When Tom was moving into his first house with his girlfriend, he found a box of old photographs as he pillaged his parents attic for furniture. There he was on the beach with Joe – smiling, gap-toothed seven-year-olds all skin and bones, their ribs sticking out of flesh stretched taught. They were yet to be subsumed by the mass that would follow in later years, yet to be subsumed by the men that would creep around those fragile boys in different ways. He had always found the idea of ‘the loss of innocence’ cringeworthy. It was, though, here for him to see, and he found himself entranced by that photo as if there were another picture inside it, and inside of that another. There was the dizzying sense of something infinite and huge and lost, and only the call of his mother drifting up from the floor below pulled him back, as if he was tethered, into reality.

[196busfiction]

The Poet.

Look at the poet.

With verbal acrobatics

He navigates the page,

Cut and thrust,

Point to point,

His pen slashing through

The nothingness to realise

Canopies of leafy forests

Swell of deepest oceans,

Crackling into being a new light

In this spinning, fizzing globe

from a thin line of blue ink.