The Thaw

2010 came, and with it, an inch or snow of snow:
A nightfall flurry muffled the street sound
And glittered in the street light;
We came home, half-drunk
And splattered from the snow-fight.                           

The next day, engines choked and spluttered,
Rubber slipped on the ice and sleet,
Commuter trains were cancelled,
And we worked a four day week.

Armed up with snowballs, rascals were king of the castle
On the railway bridge façade,
I watched a mother and a son
Make a snowman in the graveyard.

We walked across parks
Without the marks of park paths;
Took the road to avoid the pavements,
And annoyed the humbled cars.

We made strangers laugh
When we fell on our arse,
A few old people died in badly-heated flats,
And I felt a bit bad, but, you know, old people,

They tend to do that.

All around and elsewhere it was business as usual.
A bank that the public owned declined to declare its bonuses to the public,
Immigrants were taken into privatised incarceration,
Locked up and sent back home on the same damn plane they came on,
Back to that dark nation where gangs of 18 year old foreign boys
Were given new hunting equipment
To seek out the minds of ambitious mafia
And the hearts of harmless citizens.

The boys in fluro pressed their boot prints to the pavement,
We learned of ‘adverse weather conditions’
And the sales of ‘flu medicines.

Now, as always, the thaw comes and order is restored:
But as we watch the water float on parks
And swirl down drains,
Let’s hope something of the playfulness
And mis-function still remains.