Monday 5 December 2011

Bed-Sit-Prison

For a number of years after I had completed my National Service I lived in furnished room(s) in what we called in London "Bed Sit Land" and even to this very day, millions live in this lonely desolated world of squalor and are robbed blind in rent for stinking hovels....

Bed-sit Prison

Four square walls

damp in spots

dirty curtains
brown with age
sash cord broken
with missing pane
letting in the cold
pelting  rain.....

Wallpaper peeling
at its edge
patterns faded
to greenly-red
flaking ceilings
way up high
cobweb covered
like snowflake sky.....


Chipped enamel
rusted door
on two-ring oven
caked in grease
for beans on toast
night time feast...

Iron bed
with squeaking springs
gives sleepless nights
and nightmare dreams...

Alone at night
by the gas fire glow
the ticking clock
you well know
soft at first
with its rhythmic beat
deafening later
when you try to sleep...

                                                    A hole in the wall

where the floor boards meet
live the mice
we hermits keep...

They roam the room
late at night
as sitting tenants
they’re all right...

Bed-sit prison
I know you well
with your
battered furniture
musty smells
A single room
or double share
we live our life
in this brick wall cell


Peter Wicks

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