City Poem

City Poem

Under the iron bridge,

office workers, wet with rain,

crowd on coaches & trams.

I stay by the river & watch them go.

Everything is flowing now,

a hissing juggernaut of lorries, cars,

buses, passenger trains –

varying streams of atoms

in rapid motion –

racing ahead of time;

streaking by factories, allotments,

tower-blocks, back-to-back slums;

terminating or turning

at the last suburb,

at the conurbation’s edge,

where the sun slips down the sky,

into a puddle of diesel, gasoline & grease.