Twelve Hours

This is something I’ve written down on my very first day off the plane into England. The premise is that twelve hours of flight can erase all you knew of a world and plunge you into a new one.

There are twelve hours between

Each child of el Matal

And all we wished to grasp:

Twelve hours that take a lifetime

Of dozens and dozens more,

Or twelve hours that are given at birth

If the lottery favoured you

With the fairest outcome of your skin,

The unfairest to many other eyes.

Twelve hours before,

You’d know your rosé and win a village

Of boys’ hearts and girls’ lips.

Well.

It’s for ten quid here

Or sometimes less, I confess,

And writing poetry drinking it almost

Seems ridiculous

If it weren’t for all poetry

Being just as ridiculous on a level

Or another.

Twelve hours before,

This providence of God would be

The sin that flays your being in two:

Your vice is now celebrated

And let’s not even talk of your virtue.

The girls here have no curfews

And the boys here have all the wild hair,

But if you stare closely into the billboards,

Mr Lastman won more than his fair share:

Is the question to ponder

“What more could anyone wish for?”

Or is it

“Should they just wish for more and more?”

Twelve hours won’t change taxi drivers:

The aesthetics are different

But the people are the same.

Just the same, they will rip you off,

Just the same, the religious ones will preach to you,

Just the same, the natives will b***h to you,

And your faux-posh words

You learned as sacred and standardised

Which would sire all the auditory disturbance

Enough to distort the palette of your skin:

These, you see,

They’ll let a Mackem temporarily think you’re one of them

If not even a step above.

“A white taxi driver will never cheat you”,

He told me.

“Unlike immigrants, we just do our job”,

He told me.

I said (in my mind)

Man, I really wish that you would,

Why am I here to interpret your literature

If your people sufficiently could?