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To Go to NuL
After “To Go to S’pore” by Alvin Pang, after “To Go to Lvov” by Adam Zagajewski Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire − always “the proper Newcastle” to me To go to NuL. No station in NuL, except the arena for buses, all fume and light after dark when you stand on wet pavement and other passengers clatter away. To go to NuL without remembering street names but surefoot towards the suburbs. To grow up in NuL. To have learned to read in a fug of stories, those spoken, those inferred. I stand as a child looking between the slats in the cattle market, stand as a man between pubs thinking of slurs and arrogance of my youth, walk with exhaustion heavy round ears and eyes into a curry house long converted, and order something I cannot remember. To come to NuL a visitor, unable to find my friends, or drift into nostalgia postcards, crossing tramlines and entering shops where the whole family stands rigid in front of their shelves, into the structures of a map that blacklines roads I know are knit with shrubberies and trees. I remember the bloom of Christmas merry-go-rounds, picking up blues cassettes, and the hours after the nightclubs closed, when roads spread sickly tongues. Laughing there, kissing girls, coming home to a steam of dinner, tea and explanations. How to be at home in NuL, again or then, the tiled hall, the voices audible through sleep, to come at last to accept the way it lies in the valley, in deep memory, and is built up along roads far out from its core. To go back again into the town, in daylight, see how men stand as if under siege, but bend to pet a dog – not to forget NuL except as all things fade on leaving. Shortlisted in the 2013 Live Canon International Poetry Competition, and published in that year's anthology. © Mark Leech 2013 |
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