Poems by Neil Fulwood

MICRO-PUB, KELSO

Man walks in, leans on the bar.
Flat cap, olive jacket, shapeless trousers
boot-tucked - the tick-box cliché
of the half-arsed farmer fallen on
hardscrabble times. Asks of the barmaid

“Is Jim in? I’ve got a chicken
if he wants it.” Jim’s out; the fate
of the chicken shades into mystery.
A pint later, halfway down Memory Lane,
he’s slinging drinks in the trademark

Seventies rock ‘n’ roll joint that made
the fortune he squandered. Sounding
off to anyone who’ll listen, voice
like wet gravel turned by a shovel,
he remembers that Robert Whatshisname

not Palmer, the one who did Stairway
to Heaven - he used to come in, order
a beer, proffer a fifty pound note
dead sure it’d be waved away, his drinks
on the house. Emptied the till, our man

recalls, counting out a rock star’s change.
And that’s the length and breadth of it,
his once dined-out-on anecdote,
his claim to a cocked snook at fame.
The song remains the same, the audience

glazing to indifference down the years.


RED DIESEL

Lumbers out from concealed entrance
absorbing horn blast, flashed lights
and window-flung wanker sign
with a minor deity’s casual indifference.

Drags shit-spattered aluminium trailer
behind it, combined wheelbase
closing in on the road-hogging length
of some C&W-ready American rig

not that its ten forward gears push it
anywhere near a Mack or Kenworth’s BHP.
No blue collar balladeer would verse-chorus
its field-to-farm B-road odyssey

in steel guitar cadences, no filmmaker
frame it against sunset or storm.
It treats movement as a shrug, tyres
the size of an outhouse kicking up dirt.

The word juggernaut does not apply.