Love in a City (a poem)

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You may recall that I recently explored my attic and found a folder full of poetry from my teenage years. Here is another of those poems.

Once more it is a ‘dark’ image; as so many of them seem to be. Again, it is crap but it is my crap.

Love in a City

The silver gleaming on the water
Is not the moon but mercury.
A few tall chimneys stand upright
Amid the sprawling slums
And weeds grope slowly around
The cracked and yielding walls.
"The Rose" is not for chivalrous knights
But vagabonds and waifs who call it their own 
And deny even the threshold
To a friendly face.

Let her go, you nagging mother
And to your wash again,
For she is the city's daughter
Who, in the shadowy night,
Will absorb a bestial fury
When her city boyfriend comes.
She asks him where he learns his tricks,
He will not tell but she, herself, will learn
Because it pays her well.

In the shelter, they dream awhile
But there is no passion in their urgings,
Just a transient longing for difference
Yet they know they will not change.
How will it end? he will not name the day
So she and her child will call the tune.
Then he'll sit by the mercury stream,
Under the streetlight that's like a finger
And where the tyre's looped,
And wonder what it is to love.

Reading this now, I love the opening with it’s an obvious play upon the word ‘mercury’ and it’s a suggestion of something not being quite as romantic as it seems. The ‘grope’ the ‘cracked’ and ‘yielding’ are clearly all sexual references which may seem a bit puerile but still fit with the image. ‘The Rose’ is clearly a reference to a public house or bar but has obvious allusions to romance; again, though, not being what it might appear to have been.

I also like the final image of the streetlight being ‘like a finger’ and having a tyre looped; an obvious reference to marriage and a wedding ring. I dislike the phrase ‘call the tune’, which is a lazy use of a cliche.