London 1972

Of the squat in Ifield Road, there’s nothing now:
the Gunter is dead and the rubbish skips gone,
a grey gentility has grown like moss over the 1970s
as if they were what they always were, a figment.

© BH, 2024

---

It was a long time ago. Another world. A foreign country, certainly. We who went there to seek whatever temporary fortunes we thought to hope for came and went. And the riches were temporary. Or frittered away. Lifted and scattered by time, like cheap varnish.

What remains is another veneer. Time eroding it just as much.