You Dream Again of Bus Conductors

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You Dream Again of Bus Conductors

In that corner of your mind

that’s always on its way into Leicester, circa 1979.

Men in brown coats deliver rented TVs.

Your sister’s going out with an arsehole called Andy,

and smoking is good for you. You gobble

nationalised sandwiches on trains

that are all the same colour. These are the years

of porridge and brick built buildings before

automatic doors made us all soft. A simple

painted sign with the name of the owner

sits above every shop door. The air is the exhaust

fumes from the local factory. Sunday

is nothing open and nobody phoning.

Looking for the future,

you join The Labour Party

and find the past.

But there’s always someone to punch

a proper hole in your ticket

and tell you where to get off the bus.

Kevin Higgins is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events in Galway, Ireland.  He facilitates poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre; teaches creative writing at Galway Technical Institute and on the Brothers of Charity Away With Words programme. He is also Writer-in-Residence at Merlin Park Hospital and the poetry critic of the Galway Advertiser. His first collection of poems The Boy With No Face was published by Salmon in February 2005 and was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please,was published in March 2008 by Salmon. One of the poems from Time Gentlemen, Please, ‘My Militant Tendency’, featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 2009. His work also features in the anthology Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets (Ed Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010). Frightening New Furniture is his third collection of poems and was published in April by Salmon Poetry. He has new poems recently published or forthcoming in The Irish Times, Washington Square Review (New York), Harry’s Place, Emergency Verse: Poems In Defence of The Welfare State, The Raintown Review (New Mexico), Southword, The Galway Advertiser & The Bermingham Poetry Review (Alabama).

 

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