Grey Day

Carrot-faced boy with cigarette behind his ear
scrambles up the bank
bumps into me and looks up
at the burnt, toffee apple sky;
techno bass pummels underground.

Fat woman pushes a pram away from the fair
with children attached.
Her mouth, just unplugged by the cigarette,
inhales a floret of smoke
like a film playing backwards;
balloons jostle.

Land-rovers, vans, grey transits
with felt-tip number-plates,
bland white caravans, scattered at random, like sugar cubes
around the common;
fake-tanned calor-gas cylinders
prop broken aerial clotheslines.

Toyotas, Mercedes, silver Isuzus,
diesel generators congregate,
having dirty conversations in a smokey corner;
Dire Straits plays, melancholy, from nowhere,
scrambling pigeons to flight,
settling on the arc lights, high.

Rotating arms carry flashing cabins
against the darkening sky,
screaming kids upside down, somewhere
in the air
a mechanism and its counterweight swing
a graceful, heavy semaphore.

A crane holds strobes, groping
for marshmallow pink dying clouds;
three union jacks flap above the back of the ghost train,
stale alcohol, fatty burgers frying,
burnt sweet candy floss smothers
midsummer smells of heat and bleached grass.

Unfinished guinness, tyre-black,
and white plastic forks nestle in dry dirt;
bin bags cluster,
laid like lacquered snake eggs
oozing gunk.

Girls swank
swinging licorice sticks
white trousers, knicker tops,
bare backs branded with tattooed celtic knots;
a couple of coppers tuck into chips
from a white polystyrene tray;
a blue portaloo floats away down the river.

An immense man in a stained shirt waddles,
bandily planting sandalled feet,
past kids in white assembling under shadow
of an orange-tinged cascading willow,
baseball-capped geese heads nod and turn:
ghosts gathering under the day's last light.