From the bottom
end of the Square he's
taken a ladder, bold, aluminium, large,
got it through the car park, nothing bashed,
reached Butetown beyond. The guy re-rendering
from the scaffold round the Docklands Minimart
ignores him. He's put his cold chisel through
the street name. STU is says, the
ART in fragments. He buckets the lot
so no one will notice. There's a siren
gone off bottom of the flats, some kids with
the arm of a settee in a shopping trolley,
a Somali batting a rolled paper on
his knee, two Caribbeans smoking
by the betting shop. The ladder's
useless, oversized, MCALPINE in largepoint
down its shank, padlocked.
He'd throw it in the hedge if there was one,
leaves it, couple of kids cart it to the park,
muezzin's wail across the grass, dogs, smoke
from a fire of tyres. Welcome to Independent
Tropical Wales someone once sprayed on
the rail embankment wall. Gone.
I wunder if Heaven got a ghetto, it still says,
Uncollected. The
walls of the Taff vale railway embankement running alongside Bute
Street originally carried advertisments for local businesses.
Peter Finch
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