Bus Journey

It’s pencil-scrawled, the bus’s destination As if the actual journey might be arbitrary, Uncertain, an Odyssean travail. The driver is both Chaplinesque and sinister. Above his square moustache, the eyes behind the glasses Are grim as the F.B.I. He grips the steering wheel with whitening knuckles. He is festooned in bling, a Stirling Xmas tree In flaming June. A woman with silver toenails, flowing silver hair Entwined with pink like Barbie seaweed, Rests her feet on a chair, a drying mermaid. I pay and sit. Stare at an empty ashtray The trip begins. My old bones judder In their skin bag. The aisle-smells, pee and petrol. A school decants itself. The bus floods with a many-headed hydra. Beano Bedlamites…Luddites of law and order Hotspur hooligans. I am breathing icebergs A cloud thunderous with perturbation Hangs over us. Puberty hands me a shocked wreath. Straps hang from the roof, two rows of idling nooses I can imagine heads there, swaying like coconuts at a country fair. Three seats are wearing jagged gangland scars Across their faces. Veterans of vandal wars. The bus stops and the wincing door’s kicked open The pupils whooping pour outside Like a bucket of oil on daisies Somebody opens a window in the roof Air, straight from the mountain rushes in, a calm orison A feast of balm. A brightening on the horizon The trip resumes, past sheep, domestic thistle. The bus reclaims it silence, clean as a whistle.