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Check Your Accent
Ffynnon Denis

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I get a taxi going up
driven by an Ely aftershave with an accent
that can strip the lids from cans.
I aint gonna werk nooyur see
with all th money inyear I'd be a targit,
wdn't I, he tells me, I agree.
The traffic is as thick as it gets
in Cardiff at dusk when it drizzles.
We crack up the bus lane like a black bat.
When we get there he screws a tip from me
the Beeb don't give him much be fair.

Going back overrun by 30 minutes I
get Jeff a local fatboy with stickers
on the dash that tell me not to eat in his cab.
What you bin for, he asks, effortlessly overtaking
an artic full of running shoes and a pick-up
with a wheel-barrow in the back. Poetry, I say
I pronounce it poultry so as not to sound too arty.
Wise, I think. We get to my house inside which
my dinner waits. Pulling a file from the glove,
he asks, What doyou think of these?
The topsheet is headed POETIC CAB TRIPS
by A MAN IN THE TRADE
the thing is two inches thick.
God, another writer. I only do chickens, I mutter,
This looks like quite something,
you should go on tv.

 

More Roath to Llandaf than Ely but the spirit is there. Taken from Food (Seren), 2001


Peter Finch

 

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