This is a classic example of a bad title. The title is the opposite of the meaning, really, but I like it, so keep it.
Anyway, in the pandemic, I thought about outer West London in the 1980s and early 90s a lot, and this is mainly about that.
Where I live, people don't understand
People don’t understand where I live, a real place
within the tamest imagination which has slipped
off a cliff it clung to – just a workplace mishap,
they say, those who dare not venture beyond the script
to the source material, to the bodies buried
in the concrete of the overpass in summertime.
For all the conversations I hung on but was not
invited to join, all the errata I underlined
in green suburban pen, the blood smudge picnic
of only-child nitpicks, that’s not so hard to grasp,
now, is it? Is it, now we write Horatian odes
to Brunel’s first viaduct as history chugs past
with trousers down, sunburnt and swearing it’s blind
like Oedipus, wise like Tiresias, broke like
the marbled ankle of an intercity jewel thief
who lied about falling off his childhood bike,
just a journeyman millionaire slowly turning blue
from embarrassment. I live there, a skittering dog
on a working lock, while narrowboats wait for romance
to fade and a stranger to stroll straight out of the fog.
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