The Poetry Society Celebrating our centenary

Clocks, clocks, what about clocks?

What about all those station clocks

Ticking away like tyranny prophesied

In waiting rooms whose stolid old benches

Spend forever trying not to fart

And the ghosts of governesses wait

To be apprised, abused, sent

Packing with never a penny? Tick.

Afternoons. Seasons. Epochs. Tick,

A railway age in Bradshaw's hell.

Cold spring sunshine. The random

Brambly lash of the March rain. Tick.

The immortal half-length clocks,

Complacent moustachioed minor gods

Of the up-line, the down-line,

The sinister spur to the quarry,

The girls' school, the old place

The army had out in the woods. Tick.

When you are dead the clocks will step out

On the platforms and wink at each other

Before you go by, with your throats cut,

One per compartment, blood smeared

On the strap of the window, the photo of Filey,

Your faces, your crusty good coats, the matching

Crimson carriage cloth. Stiletto heels of blood

Tick away down the corridors. These trains

Are special. Tick. Their schedule is secret,

Their platform remote from the roar

Of the great vaulted terminus. Tick. They are coming

To get you one dim afternoon

With a John Dickson Carr in your bag

And a packet of three, or a cake for your auntie.

Aunts sit and wait at the end of the phone,

Under instruction from God and his Will,

Darling old spinsters with eyes out on stalks -

Evil is evidence: sex = sin.

Now is the hour when crime is alone

And just before seven the clocks stand still.

Now the bells go bong and the prisoner walks

Down from the scaffold and in like Flynn

For a gallon of mild and a joke about sex.

Even his honour's compelled to admit

Not minding a corker with bishops and tarts.

The hangman will top it by mentioning shit.

O who could not love it, most English of arts -

Now they are in it right up to their necks.