Two Poems

UN COEUR SIMPLE

When I arrived in London
to set a trap or two for fortune,
I got a job in Covent Garden,
as a vegetable invoice clerk.
It earned me seven pounds a week.
That was a marvellous place to work ...
Now there's a restaurant ('The African Cook')

next door, but then a saveloy stall
fed the market porters and the retail
greengrocers and the odd gent in tails.
The Communist Party's offices
were near, probably bombed, rebuilt with those
translucent bricks they used to use
in the ceilings of public lavatories:

a glass house where sideways was up.
...