THE HONICKNOWLE BOOK OF THE DEAD


I'm waiting for the arrival of the pit
I'm standing outside a telephone box
on the comer of Parade and Crownhill Road.
I'm waiting for the newsagents
on my favourite street corner
to become Easterbrooks again.
Waiting for Dewhurst and Liptons
to make their long-awaited comebacks
like Dr Who and the Daleks.

I'm standing aged ten or eleven years old,
midway between the bus shelter
and the fish and chip shop.
There's crowds of people,
packed four or five deep
on both sides of the Crownhill Road,
as the Queen Mother passes through West Park
on her way to the Tamar Bridge
with a pair of pink scissors
and a bottle of Plymouth Gin.

The patriots in the crowd are waving flags.
Royalists take photographs for the mantelpiece
and someone in the crowd thinks
this is a fairytale
and someone in the crowd thinks
she'd like to a princess
in a party dress of royal blue.
And I remember thinking
I'd never in so many people
gathered together in one place,
never realised there were so many people
living in the world,
never saw so many hands, waving,
furiously waving,
on both sides of the Crownhill Road,
and the Queen Mother waves back,
don't even stop for fish and chips.

I'm waiting for the arrival of the past,
glancing back over my shoulder
down the badly lit tunnel of the last forty years
to the lost online of Coronation Street
and the Crossroads Motel,
where the real life of television.
migrated into the living room.

So at age sixteen I go into exile
and walk under the bright lights of adolescence
down an infinity of Crownhill Roads
where The Royal Family will never live,
and I begin to fall in love with the poetry of street corners
and I begin to save my paper boy money
for Catherine wheels,
and I begin to save for Christmas.
And I don't want a bicycle,
I don't want a train set,
I want a garden shed
which I'll call Buckingham Shed,
I'll make this shed
a centre of popular entertainment
a night club in the back garden
for nocturnal readings
from The Honicknowle Book Of The Dead

I'm waiting for the arrival of my knighthood,
waiting for a member of The Royal Family
to officially open Buckingham Shed,
to step inside onto bright red lino
only to discover it's really a Tardis,
decked out in bunting
from across the vast empires of time and space.

I'm waiting for the arrival of the past, waiting to win
the Nobel Prize for being your plaything, waiting for
The Honicknowle Book Of The Dead to be published,
waiting for the fourteenth Dalai Lama to buy it
from the shop next door to the shop next door.