The Watercats Poetry Bus

Sex or drugs or rock and roll, said Watercats - write a poem on one of them. Well, I only vaguely remember sex and drugs, so it'll have to be rock and roll, spending the summer of 1977 hitchhiking around England following the Clash.


We are also supposed to record ourselves reading it. I've had a go but technology and me aren't yet bosom buddies so it could take a while to figure it out. Until then, the poem only, I'm afraid...



Ode to Joe

Sweaty hands levering on the waist-high stage,
I leapt and thrashed like a skewered fish,
hooked on Simenon’s tireless bass line.
Mick Jones played the guitar hero,
posing and flouncing like a crew-cut Dave Hill,
a bit too uncool for the cool uncool.
Topper bludgeoned the cymbals to death
in a frenzy of manic destruction,
and you,
centre stage,
eyes half-closed,
mouth supplicating the mike,
left knee throbbing like a metronome,
your harsh, guttural, rock and roll voice,
echoing the frustrations of our crappy lives,
wincing as yet another beer can
bounced off your head.

I wore my strategically ripped t-shirt,
daubed with painted slogans,
that shrieked my existence to a world-weary world,
fastened with safety pins filched from the biscuit tin
that ma called a medical box,
in those few halcyon months
before the designer bondage suits
and the coiffured Mohawks
wrested control back to the middle man.
Another shower of spittle
and you lashed out angrily with your boot
and the tension rose another decibel.
Jones rushed forward and swung a fist
at a fat kid with long hair in the front row
two yards but many miles to my right.

And more beer bottles sailed over our heads
and shattered in shards on the stage.
“Lannan’s burning!” you screamed
Staccato drum roll.
“Lannan’s burning!” we screamed back,
corkscrewing higher,
soaked in Saturday night blood and sweat and gob,
till our bodies were drowned in the unrelenting rhythm.

Many years later, driving my Primera to work,
I had to pull over when the young radio presenter
glibly mentioned in passing that you had died.
Hard-faced and stony-hearted,
I never cried when my father died,
but I shed a tear for you, that cloudy morning
and with you, my youth.