My Apex Window – London Bridge and the Odeon, Leicester Square

Desolate mountaineering
when the guides have all gone home
you can’t reach them on the phone

Or the pilots, or the guppies
Lost and lonely, can you phone me
I am your Dad, your one and only

I am your father lost and lonely
The world and all its feathers phoney
I picture you smiling, making happy face

When I was seventeen I had a dream
Of what my life would be like
And it was nothing like this, no not at all

The Bridge over the River Kwai
the film in which Sir Alec Guinness dies
guinness and champagne relieves the pain

London Bridge 1973, went box-girder
replacing stone-arch bridge that replaced another
this stood 600 years, witnessed medieval murder

Before those bridges they were made of timber
before that Roman order saw them cross our border
Pontem Londoniarum falling down to find a singing game

At Leicester Square I watch from my small apex window
above the rush of celebrities and classic films, they arrive
chauffeur driven, lead-lady smitten, director bitten

Stand by your beds watch out for the reds
Holly GoLightly and the things she said, Audrey Hepburn
sophistication on the big screen became a kind of queen

Our cultural history caught like stranded wildebeest
gnu savaged at the crocodile river in the blistering sun
our sweaty horses set, our race-start gun, the finalé run

Attenborough pass the gauntlet, pass the baton on
and on. Greta Thunberg, pass to Xiye Bastida, Xiye
pass to Lesein Mutunkei watch Antarctic’s setting sons

Come daughters of the revolution and Tyrannosaurus Rex
who birthed a notion with their elemental child, their suffragettes
before the electric storm or even Greenpeace was born

All allegiances, all loyalties sworn, Sally, Sally Greensleeves
don’t ever leave me, pride of our alley, yes you mean the whole world
and all its tiny houses made out of ticky tacky

El-awrence fought for Brit-ain on the silverscreen, David Lean
upsides Arabia, Boadicea fought the Romans not for the black oil
Welsh Queen Buddug, Tee heE Lawrence, hero or agent royale ?

Polanski’s creative energy ran out much too fast
Hollywood has its demons tied to HMS Bounty’s mast
LA cinema viewers their mouths aghast

Down on Sunset Boulevard, their fifteen minutes in the sun
William Holden, Gloria Swanson their glossy tile review its in history’s can
cinemagoers view the reality of earths sadnesses, O’ the horror

Apocalypse Now bled from a heart of darkness
Joseph Conrad sat at his typewriter, tippety tap, ‘all work and no play’ ‘makes Jack dull boy’ the moon still ‘shining’ for Kubrick and King

Sydney Pollack sang a song of Af-rika, of Mozart strains and aeroplanes
Runnaway Trains, Jon Voight searching for Nazi stains in Turtle drains
Eastwood on the High Plains a Drifter moseying on down, nosing around

The starlings are in a murmuration high above the Leicester Square
Just hours before the Premiere – Judy Garland, Fred Astaire
The trees are bare where the starlings and the people stand and stare