Good-bye London

A feeling of loneliness
Just me in a crowd.
No more going from north to south,
Inner city to inner city,
No more hops on the 73,
Different languages,
Different people.

Watching the bars,
Population change.
Today's Latinos,
Tomorrow's Eastern Europeans.
Girls, blonde and pretty,
Delighted customers.
Dark-skins in the kitchens.

In a daze, people come and go.
Some want the countryside,
Others their ‘home’,
To me, it's my town
The buses, the streets.
Trendy Hampstead, Camden Town,
Covent Garden, My Inner Cities.

So good-bye to Hackney
With its smelly Luanda bins
Busy and dirty Dalston
And to the Silverlink.
To Spanish squatters,
Kurdish militants,
West Indian yardies.

Good-bye to Highbury & Islington Station
With the homeless sitting by Barclays
And to beautiful Highbury Fields,
And to Clissold Park
(Unmanned toilets,
Needles in the playground).
Good-bye to London Fields.

Good-bye to Laycock kids
And friends of friends of Laycock kids,
Harassing the neighbourhood,
Shouting insults at middle-aged adults.
To the hostel opposite
And its fire engines,
To loud Kurdish music and to rap.

Good-bye to Brixton, Stockwell, Newham
And the Angolan community,
Asylum-seekers
And the NHS.
The NHS, my children’s birth, work.
Good-bye to the British Government,
To Tony Blair and the Welfare State.

Good-bye to the woman who took my mirror
Mirror of fake respectability.
Showing its veins, cracks, its fragility,
Like the kids shouting insults.
Respectability that crumbled away
Like the paint on the door.
Protecting us from them.

Good-bye to alternative London,
To unthinking London
To alienated London,
Good-bye to the long gone squats of Stoke Newington and Clissold Crescent
And to the long gone best carrot cake in town.
Not the Starbuck-Costa-Caffé Nero-carrot-passion-double-chocolate-cake in a pre-toasted ciabbata-style and iced-coffee-modern-imitation.
But to hippy, lovingly made, before-moving-to-the-West-Country Style!
(White, alienated, West Country).

Good-bye to Consumer Choice
(or may be not)
At least, to its more ideological,
Clinical version.
Goodbye to cynicism,
And emotionless condescending,
And to post-modern “everything is acceptable for a laugh" attitude.
Goodbye to the centre of the world,
And to the wastage of the pieces of my life.

Julia Felmanas

London 4/9/2003