Crowley's Toad (An Ode to Oxford and Cowley Road)

Crowley’s Toad
(Ode to Oxford and Cowley Road)

Epigraph - “Very nice place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.”
- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Cowley Road heaves, it ebbs and flows
Oxford not sung, but scarcely less known
This inner city arterial mass
Possibilities infinite -
Pumping and grinding, colliding the hours
A hustle and bustle of spangled people and cars -
As the whispers of day turn to moans in the night
The Bullingdon boys on the lash for a fight
Cowley Road writhes with a life of its own
Down to Magdelen Bridge – shooting up sleepy spires

Cosmopolitan, candid and complete
Cowley Road rests but never - does sleep.
To the carnival crowds in the haze of July
The ketamine kids ripping up Lucy’s sky.
A melting pot, bursting - a cultural mash
Worldwide food on the door
Served with crack, smack and hash.
The call of night music from clubs and from bars
As the sad busker boy sits and strums his guitar.
Shoppers bustle, students play -
The street so scuffed and seedy
Once - speaks more than Wren and Christchurch say………….

“punting past parson's pleasure as an undergrad and seeing old dons sunning their massive, nude, wrinkled scrotums” - Unnamed Author on Oxford

Steve Thomas - Dec 2007