Robert Verdon, #177, Day-glo Days

perhaps it’s a glowing daydream

rain like a thousand distant typewriters,

Remington manuals in some fifties office,

echoing along idle ducts through my bored imagination

behind hollow eyes and eight grassed knolls

spanned by forking freeways of space-age American cars —

1951, maybe, and we are young, white, and working,

if you call it that, scribbling and tuning in

to the whimpering of Korean latitude and longitude

in the new curved atlas on the big imperial desk

by the normally wholesome sunny window

that opens onto a little bee-haunted garden for show,

not really for unskilled white-collar members

of the sinuous upper working-class, something

we never call ourselves, because

we of the red scare years in crewcuts or pony-tails,

we of the red stilettoes or creased brothel-creepers,

we of the Dad’s in a union but he isn’t a commie generation, are too busy

fantasising about the latest slinky encounter at the soda fountain, or atomic annihilation,

and it’s all suburban fantasy anyway,

as I was not even born at the time, never admired such complacency,

remember of that decade only the wet, narrow streets

of slate-grey Dunvant in Wales, with the gold moon over Pen-y-Bryn

— and have never been to America.