no way back

I went to an open mike evening the other day. It was supposed to be in a fairly spartan room above a pub, but the bookings had got mixed up and the SWP were there before us, so at the very last minute the venue was changed.

Tempting though I thought it to opt for politics in the here-and-now, not poetics in some unknown and distant there, others were keen to stick to the original plan, so the readers and their audience relocated.

The new venue was a basement room, although the décor was altogether too decadent to make me feel like an underground poet. The Trotskyists might have liked the wall colour, but I’m sure the spit-and-sawdust pub setting suited them better.

I say “basement”, but I suppose in fact ground level was lower at the back, or there would have been no windows downstairs.

 
Not that we could access them.

It seems that the world of discovery that lies “through the arched window” is out of bounds. I wonder if the square and round windows are similarly barred.

Once more, then, I find “you can’t go home again.”

Even little ted looks rather worse for wear.