Two Poems by Nicholas Hogg

Royalty

In the alleyways walled by brick and fence,
spike and barb, where the backyard guards
are the pictures of dogs
on padlocked doors, another pleb falls.

Among the shining
spines of bloodied needles, the burnt-out
wreck of a moped – torched and dumped
like a mob-hit corpse – the broken glass

has caught the sun. What once
was a bottle of brandy
crunched underfoot, where the dealers prowl
like starving cats, is now a glitter of gems

and precious. And if you’re high enough,
drunk, or determined to view the world
through a lens of beauty
or ignorance, note the emerald weeds

where the squatters won’t live,
growing on the slate of a derelict house.
This is the wrong end of town.
A mile from the gate where Richard III

was slung
naked on a horse and speared in the buttocks
to be sure that he was dead,
there are junkies curled like the car park king.

Heatwave

I ride through estates I haven’t been since I was a boy,
pulling wheelies on a BMX with plastic spokes and blue tires
in the summer of 1985, when the green grass died and the brook dried up
and flying ants seeped from drain grates like smoke, before my mother
doused them with a kettle of boiling water.

That was the year we dragged the TV into the backyard,
so my grandma could watch Wimbledon on a deckchair
my step-dad had nicked from a pub garden. She sat like Queen Victoria,
sipping lemon barley, and then gin, while Boris Becker
skipped across the scorched brown courts. When he kissed the silverware
he was a prince, her prince, and she forgot the war.

That was the summer we flicked matches into piles of wood
the colour of bone, and watched the flames riot through the undergrowth,
before some snitch called the cops.
Still, we got away with it, most of us, the skinny kids on secondhand bikes.
First of all we rode out the drought,
and then our boyhood, before the shitty jobs and dirty drugs,
the car wrecks and crime — petty enough to pay the rent — and the three-day
benders in stranger’s beds, an odyssey of poverty and hedonism,
calling at airports and benches, hotels and prison, the First Class cabin
and a stolen van.

And you might well think, I certainly do, that after all that distance,
the decades in transit from a humdrum town, that I’d never come back.
Yet here I am. The same rider on a different bike,
and the mercury still rising.

Nicholas Hogg is the author of Tokyo, now in production as a Ridley Scott film starring Eric Bana. His short stories have won numerous awards, and been broadcast by the BBC. In 2021 he received the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and has recent work published in Magma, The North, The London Magazine, and Poetry London.