Walking down the small town high street

Among the liquorice all sorts

Of shops cafes and pubs

There is the barbers

With flashing neon scissors

The corner café with the bloke

Who has cleared his plate

Of sausage egg beans and chips

And from a yawning plastic pouch

His hand rolls a neatly tailored cigarette

As his face his mind are somewhere else

 

Further up the street the vape shop

Is full of folks and clouds of

Heavily scented smiling smoke

Cheery chatting faces

Say you can’t touch me in here

I am warm snug and safe

Then there’s the pub on the next corner with

The bloke who looks like the dad from the Royle family

His eyes intent on the T.V. screen

Further up earlier passed the

Middle eastern muscled guy

Leaning against the outside of his shop

Bored and blowing smoke rings into the air

Later on the way back his barbers shop is full

Scissors busy clicking as he dances round the chair

 

 

Then there’s the shop with everything

But the kitchen sink

On the cheap slacked and stacked to the ceiling

In places

Including diaries from 2012 for just fifty p

In a corner salon, an older woman has had her hair

Coloured styled and waved

Looking uncertainly in the mirror

At the co-op that’s all bright sterile lime green

A queue is formed at the tills like those lost souls

Waiting for a hand out at the soup kitchen

Outside, a pregnant east European women

Smiles and proffers a copy of the big issue

To no avail

The shop with mops and brooms

Everything conceivable in plastic

Including storage box some translucent

Others all colours of the rainbow

 

Up and down the street

Are a smattering of charity shops

Full of other people’s tat

DVD’s that nobody wants to watch

And C. D’s that nobody wants to hear

Butchers with cold meat pies

And the promise of hot roast beef, pork balms

A greengrocers that looks reassuringly cold

Slightly tattered and worn

No room for high gloss glass mirrors

And tiles

Inside are scoop them

Up scales and brown paper bags

There’s the alternative therapy shop that invites you

To use any of a number of healing ways

Including dreamcatchers cards and crystals

In all of those that are empty of customers

The owners sit staring at their phones

 

The street is its self, alive with the chatty clattered buzz

Of people buggies squalling babies

Naughty children and electric chairs

As they all go about their business

The disbelief at the ATM

‘how much?’

In this the high street

In the long-forgotten town

Where today meets yesterday and back

Slapping its self around the face

With all that it tries to be

And all that it is proudly not