Football Poets

Under the Radio

¶ 1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 She was talking to me under the radio,
under the Saturday food programme
guests cautioned against innuendo

¶ 2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 who went for humour in unlikely combos
while eyes sank lower above the wheel.
If anything can combine, list anything.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 In two hundred yards, bear left to turn right.
The Plough is above in the day’s sky
and before, as an implausible roundabout

¶ 4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 where the first exit to St Alban’s
requires a turning to the right
on a roundabout within a roundabout

¶ 5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 way of saying: ‘You may end up
in Hemel Hempstead against your will today.’

¶ 6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 She was talking to me under the radio
joke intonations that dip in the sentence
under the aeroplane fuel of Bedfont.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 Are satellite voices mixed with your app
for air traffic, so we don’t know if we’re u-turning
or the approach is clear for a Colnbrook landing?

¶ 8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 She was talking to me under the radio
traffic despatches we could have predicted.
Driving down South Africa Road today

¶ 9 Leave a comment on verse 9 0 at ten-to-three is best avoided,
as is Caversham Bridge and Reading
from every direction: the Radio Berkshire

¶ 10 Leave a comment on verse 10 0 traffic report should just play ‘shambolic tailback’
on a loop so Mandy can relax with a coffee.
She was talking to me under the radio

¶ 11 Leave a comment on verse 11 0 overlay of mumblings. Were we really
now having to travel up through Barnes
only to be stranded on the Chiswick Eyot?

¶ 12 Leave a comment on verse 12 0 She was talking to me under the radio
talk on Western Sahara. In the sirocco winds,
body and face covered entirely, wearing sunglasses,

¶ 13 Leave a comment on verse 13 0 there’s a garbled chat in Moroccan Arabic,
but it’s hard to read the body language.
Beyond disorientated, off the ait

¶ 14 Leave a comment on verse 14 0 now the sun has lost its midday reference
at the zenith to a dusk of shallow silence,
the voice is one of clear direction

¶ 15 Leave a comment on verse 15 0 removed from a disordered palimpsest.
‘Follow the Beverley Brook to Mayflower Wetlands’
is as sharp as it gets above the radio background

¶ 16 Leave a comment on verse 16 0 phenomena of scrambled contexts.
Would you call it fate, now, or the universe,
a divine nudge, random voice or inner compass?

¶ 17 Leave a comment on verse 17 0 It’s a signal received and another tuned out,
waves modulated one end, receiver adjusted
at this. Now within the radius wheel beams

¶ 18 Leave a comment on verse 18 0 something extra spoke from up above
in low earth orbit or over the ground
from a random tuning in

¶ 19 Leave a comment on verse 19 0 to waves beyond our line of sight
amplified from distant radio horizons
and we seemed to know the way to go

¶ 20 Leave a comment on verse 20 0 as voices emerge by Heston, Bagshot,
Hangar Lane, Sunbury and Handy Cross,
The Plough again or Seven Stars,

¶ 21 Leave a comment on verse 21 0 Ravenscourt Park, and we find a way again
through interference, stranded time on ice
behind our goal in Gretzky’s Zone

¶ 22 Leave a comment on verse 22 0 and cross-multiplied voices under the radio.