Red Phone Boxes
Adam Kammerling

Between Haywards Heath and Gatwick,
there's a trackside clearing deep in scrub
where thirty red phone boxes stand in an arc.
Their positioning, deliberate and deep in woods,
makes a Pagan ritual: red hoods, torches, prayers
to bygone England, a sacrifice of rabbit.

On Lewes Road in Brighton, a red phone box has been
nudged to death by a long, slow storm. 19 of 26 windows
smashed, chunks chewed out its frame, old conquest’s names
graff-tattooed on face and back. DIO, COST, MSG, ERKS.
Anti-fash stickers melt on its skin. At the box's top,
four waspish crowns glare out like weary compass points.
They don't know how their house got into such a state.

No one will ring their folks from this phone box,
pleading for a lift home from town. No one will make
emergency calls, no one will organise drug deals.
Children won't dial the operator, ask for McDonald’s delivered
to the bench up the street. The phone box thought itself
quite the host, but its stories dried up like we ran out
of coins. It remembers civilians queued, as it stood
proud red and British as 'sorry'. Baffled now
by Lewes Road, it can't understand the brightness of olives
in windows of the Turkish market, cannot pronounce 'baklava'.
It doesn't understand why people don't buy more crumpets!
Its skin is dirty, smudged with the 80's failures that won't wash out.
Walk past. You'll catch a whiff of whatever administrative alkalines
are eroding the NHS's base, border control trucks, ganging round
tube stops, dopplegänged high streets, town to town, the dog shit gag
of business and its flatline swagger. No one wants to stand inside that smell.
This phone box loiters on Lewes Road in the robes of pre-war Britain,
humming like it hasn't washed for sixty-five years. COST and ERKS
hang their names with 'fuck you' tacks, will not be condescended to,
will not be scrubbed out, they scorch this square of ground,
guard it with spray cans, till a new totem stands in its place.

                                                                     And when we are dead and passed
into History's sideways wink, a young woman, snorkeling in an underwater
forest, between the ocean and the old airport, will find an arc of phone boxes
standing on the lake bed and remembering them from books she read
as a child, dive down to see those bones of ancient Britain up close
and move amongst them like fish through pillars of pink coral.

Adam Kammerling cut his teeth at the open-mics and rap battles of the Brighton hip-hop scene. He is the Brighton Hammer and Tongue Slam Champion 2010, the Hackney Slam Champion 2011 and the UK Slam Champion 2012. Adam delivers workshops in schools and has worked with numerous London charities promoting spoken word and rap as positive and healthy forms of self-expression.

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