Ragetown

There's a town out there
where few people go,
surrounded by a battered steel wall,
a gnarled and twisted gate.
Open to a single train.

The train arrives
at dusk,
and newcomers
enter Ragetown
through the carriage windows
or kick down the doors.
Ticket barriers are made
to be vaulted.

The streets ignite
after dark
with unadulterated pandemonium.
People choose their weapons
insensibly
as is the way of the rage.
The signal is a body
hurled through a bar window.

Mobs flood the main square
and the rage takes hold.

The fighting erupts,
blossoms into a no-holds barred brawl,
an incandescent blur of madness.

People unleash their fists and teeth,
some armed with cutlery and gardening tools.
Someone sprints through the chaos
waving a mace above their head,
another whisks their victim's face
into crimson abstract artistry.
A would-be chainsaw massacrist
caught in a flamethrower's blaze.

Windows shattered,
walls torn asunder,
houses flaming ruins,
streets obliterated,
the bank demolished
by an enthusiastic demolisher
with weapon's grade wrecking ball.
The bank manager
flings his cash as arrows,
then is flung into the next street.

Heads smacked against doors,
tables dismembered with knives and forks.

The road rage arrives.

Cars screech,
flail around in the dust.
Skulls and bodies
crushed under tyres
as a bus slams
into the steel wall
while lorries smash and crash,
horns ring down the roads.
A solitary woman in a trolley
careens through the mayhem.

The rage subsides
and the streets fall silent.
Only when the light returns,
it reveals the wreck of Ragetown
smouldering in the glare.

NaPoWriMo #27: Song for Home

Five tries, two conversions,
the statistics required
to unleash mayhem onto the streets.

They flood out of the stadium,
pour through the side streets
into every pub in town,
singing to the sky beyond the rafters.

In the railway station
the pigeons start awake in their roosts
as the thunder of a thousand footsteps
rumbles up onto the platform.

A cross-city trains slithers alongside,
every carriage a battleground
filled to the brim like fishermen's nets
and hauled to cities beyond the hills

reverberating with drunken choruses
along every mile of darkening rail
while the city sings into the night.

NaPoWriMo #6: Last Minutes of the Day

Concrete's cold embrace

stretching out to meet the sky.

Grasping at the clouds 

with fingers of steel and glass.

The towers of commerce

caressed by the last rays of day,

an orange inferno bathing the rooftops

but shading the streets.

The vacant shop fronts

with hooded figures in sleeping bags

shivering and hunched over,

silhouetted by the glow within.

The trains clatter along aching tracks,

the seagulls swoop and dive 

in the space between the towers

until at last the inferno

is swallowed by the hills beyond

and the city lights take hold. 

NaPoWriMo #28: Railbound Vision

The glass of a carriage window,
granting views of the passing countryside,
a blurred tapestry morphing
into cold concrete and metal
of the rain-drenched cityscape.

Many hours are passed
staring through this window,
the fields, trees and rivers
blending into daydreams
of snapshots from the past
and hopes for the future,
a crystal ball looking both ways.

Then the monotone announcer
tells no one in particular
that the train will be arriving at...
And the kaleidoscope vision
dissipates.

NaPoWriMo #24: Transformation

So, just six more days to go until the end of NaPoWriMo 2017, and it's left a trail of poetry in its wake. With that in mind, here's another poem about South Wales, and about one city in particular which has a strange habit of remaining aesthetically consistent no matter what new development happens.

Transformation

A train station,
Newport railway Station.
Standing since the days
when Queen Victoria
tried to be most amused
and failed.

It's barely changed since then,
save for one illustrious addition,
the segmented silver concourse
with translucent domes at both ends,
joined by a footbridge strung out
like an enormous grey millipede.

The future, they said.
Modernisation, they said.
Newport is ready
to welcome the world, they said.

The same brown soot cloaks it now.
The old platforms lie in its shadow,
still Victoria, still drab and paint-chipped,
just like everything else.