One has mountain-margins,
lumps that poke the ether.
One protects its people
wedged ‘twixt wood and river.
Kathmandu’s like Walthamstow, they ought to be twin towns,
East is East, Eggs is Eggs, Curry is Curry.
Walthmansdu’s like Kaththamtow, the shop-signs spell things wrong,
and all the children want to take your money.
One has yellow youngsters
in Nirvana t-shirts,
one has blonde-haired beatniks
drink chai, talk of g-spots.
Kathmandu’s like Walthamstow, a sprawling home-from-home,
with dogs that bark and bark on the streets below.
Bus-drivers speak an incomprehensible language,
take sudden detours and expect you to know.
Comments
pinkpiggles | January 7, 2009 - 22:52
Wow - I really like this.
The rhymes are really well managed and not too intrusive, but help carry the poem along like the bus journey in the final stanza. The bus journey makes a lot of sense, actually, with the structure as wel: detours in description from one town to the other without any warning, and expecting the reader to know which is which, nicely echoed in the journey at the end.
I particularly like the mangling of names; and the fact that this only occurs once (neatly mentioned alongside the mis-spelled shop signs) and corrects itself for the third time.
Ace! :o)
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Macjoyce | January 7, 2009 - 23:49
Hey, thanks for commenting, it's not often someone gets as much out of one of my poems as you have here, so I'm grateful you looked so deeply into it. The appropriateness of the mis-spelling and the bus journey are completely accidental. But now I can pretend they're not.
This poem is one of the few occasions where I use half-rhyme. In a lot of my poems, the rhymes are very intrusive indeed...
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