London Traffic

Monday morning.
Still here:
third floor, flat 336, Sernanders Väg.
I force myself awake.

Scandinavian winter’s rising.
Just another frigid snowscape dawn.
I’m surprised:
even brittle beauty finally becomes a bore.

Midnight Sun now mere memory
- cast out by season’s turn.
Good riddance to that smirking late-night gatecrasher;
a smug fool who always stuck around too long.

But, exiled and fragile at zero degrees and less, I remain.
Victim of my own mistakes;
a studious jailbird marking off
- and off -
- and off -
- and off -
the days while dreaming of escape.
Alone, when all I want is a thousand miles away.

I turn on my radio, medium wave,
to hear a voice or two to help me face the day.
Instead, manic morse code dot-dash-dances, berserker-style;
and static sizzles, steams and fizzes like rattling pebbles on a high-tide beach.

From the black sonic swell, voices coalesce enticingly - but soon, too soon, they fade.
Their ebb and flow a bubbling babble of Babel,
telling truncated tall tales, half-heard half-truths,
slowly losing substance to electronic ether’s unforgiving undertow.

Then, amid the siren-spirit voices, three trite and trivial phrases are ejected:
“Tailbacks at Elephant and Castle.”
“Roadworks on Hanger Lane Gyratory.”
“Surface flooding in Maida Vale.”

From sky-borne sound-squall, sudden sense descends. Random radio resolves
into capital commuters’ rain-grey tales of mundane Monday morning woe.
An unexpected past-horizon glimpse of Rush-Hour-on-Thames;
a scene unseen from my purgatorial snowbound Swedish low.

And I cry.

For while their city is not my city;
and their Monday is not my Monday;
and their life is certainly not my life;
to England’s most lost and yearning boy, right now
their rain-sodden journey into another sickly-sour London sunrise
gives me a hint of hope of home one day.

Sandsend 27/9/22

A&E