To Suburbia

There’s nothing immediately wrong with it,
other than the distant quake-like
roar of cars, soft with the breeze;
the reversing beeps of Biffa trucks and
the sky, sliced-white by planes.

All that dilutes, I guess, along with the commute
leaving weekends turgid yet flavourless,
rinded with stereotypes; creosote and long,
wafting Sunday lunches. Yet to live
life knowing that pure, blank-slate boredom –

proper boredom – involving cows and
broadbandless living rooms is waiting
beyond the motorway’s orbit would be sufficient
for any poem to temporarily lose its
rhyme scheme, and for me to say “Sod

your Travelcard! It might not be Pop Larkin,
but it’s scoured and unladen!” Better to have the
beat of a churning silo and the sweet-death scent
of an abattoir than the odour of Mrs. Jenkins’
pork tenderloin, wafting in tacit rancour over

your half-mowed “communal” front lawn...
Garden toys, algaed; ponds putrid with dank leaves;
door slams echoing for want of company, and
a world home to the busiest, sullenest most double-
yoked nothingness I have ever known.