There are no horizons in a city,

only those within yourself.

I couldn’t tell where the city ended

and the people began,

there were only individuals

with crowd-like tendencies

and eternal hopefuls

dreaming of big fat redundancies.

I went through every street in the city

and couldn’t find one person whom I remotely liked.

The revolving doors of human happiness

were jammed shut with people

pushing in every direction

apart from the right one.

To escape the city, I took to the country

… only to find that the city had got there first,

flanked on all sides by ivory tower blocks.

I felt like driving my fist into an oncoming truck

or smashing up a train,

or injecting raw words straight into a vein.

I switch on the TV – which tells me,

apparently,

everything is

drifting towards a state of perfection

but never quite getting there.

Modern living is getting faster

and there are more twists in it than novelty pasta.

We prefer a little truth and a little lie

to a bigger, more factual picture

and life and death

take on different aspects

depending upon

which side of the street they’re viewed from.

Inscribe the child with the tribe

or welcome to evolution MTV style.

And all the while

the cure for a lack of love remains

a long time coming.

We need another inept leader,

kerb-crawler or crank caller,

like a fish needs a trawler.

We have nothing to fear but soaring prices,

global warming, mass unemployment,

economic collapse and government by the

Liberal Democrats

– and fear itself.

We are eating a starter in the

This-Wasn’t-in-the-Brochure Diner.

A Fawlty Towers style waiter

will bring the main course later.

In 2008 Paul was poet for the London borough of Brent and he performed at the new Wembley Stadium. He has two poems in the new Penguin A-Z of children’s poetry. ‘Don’t try this at home’ is taken from his new collection Catching the Cascade. (www.paul-lyalls.com)

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Paul Lyalls Poetry