Neighbourhood Watch

      This Street has grown stale.

      The house in which the old Jamaican lived

      has given up the will to dance.

      The young lawyer and his lovely wife

      have dug up his garden. Gone now

      the remnants of his failed experiments –

      the exotic blooms that never quite happened,

      the plants that, like him, never wholly took root.

      One by one the souls of these houses and their tenants

      have been undone by the fingers of bankers.

      Among the debris where the religious lady wept

      now only a sprinkler weeps. Those refugees from

      the way things are supposed to be – the mysterious Pole,

      the Italian students, the immaculate prostitute –

      all gone from number seven.

      Behind the window of number forty

      nothing moves any more. How suddenly

      that house lost its tongue! Within a year of each other

      the old maids who lived there

      donated their observations to the grave.

      Like them, this street has grown secretive.

      Glimpsed behind car windows bored children

      are ferried back and forth, and are eaten up by doors.

      Neighbours slip from memory, all their battles

      and secret torments melting so effortlessly away.

      Rooms are repainted, lavish curtains appear in windows.

      This street has suddenly grown staid.

      On the wall of the alcoholic playwright’s house

      a blue plaque has sealed its fate. Alarm bells ring

      too late to be of use. The street’s soul, stolen long ago.