MOSSLEY SURREAL
(LONG STORY)
I was there the day
Mossley, town
of my birth,
went
as surreal as it could
the day this, little Pennine town
hosted a visit by
the completely surreal
and me
in my parents’ nice
little 40s brick
semi-detached house
up to their crazy nonsense
I was to yet figure out
down from Manchester
(where I would go
to university) on
a camel, in a caravan,
the surreal
on its way
to mess
with our field gray
Northern Englishness
us afterthoughts of Empire
who maybe
had not seen better days
too early to
pose the existential threat
of psychedelia
doom us
to a world of
Sergeant Pepper colours
snarling Jagger Stones
up
in your face
though our
little Tame river flowing
to become
the Mersey
certain to
back wash everybody one day
in the full
Lennon-McCartney
helter-skelter
Walrus, Strawberry Fields
awakening experience of
full-flood
hallicinatory Liverpool
sound
fish and chips, that staple fare,
squid, octopussified
by the brush
of the immortal Dali
decades before
colonization
by McDonald’s
and then the vagrants, puppets,
teddy boys and
ne’re do wells
up on the moors turned
raging rebel
nor did the Anglican Church
up in Micklehurst
for all
its solid stone and
hegemonic presence
survive this
assault
unscathed, do any better
and me
just ten and
confused as shit, but sticking
my neck out to
understand what
going on
laughing my head off
as this
my little
former world went wrong
that head
rolling rolling rolling
the length of England down
to Southampton
for crisis crisis
my father fired and
can get
no job
trying his luck
in an apartheid white
Christian national
land
and me
long story
living that
bad surreal through
to its
happy surreal end
in my twilight as
overly surreal sort
of South African
living at
a distance
British revolutions
in sound
poems 2 die for 