2 New Poems

Building Starts

From peaks you take on EU crest
qualities, those pointillist patriot dances
when spoken as debt transactions
in back rows of designed Routemasters,
a sort of fevered plotting for the
young and crisp-thought set.

Meetings of trembled fingers,
nervous-pawing places we take between,
not physical as were the hanging vines,
not close as the slouching water runs,
but still sparking in that strange way
misfits do when burned-down dreaming.

Through bright flash sections, digits
we can’t wait for as once we did
with parchments and ink dabs for
signage timing, third string of
tin can phones for hollow speech,
it’s a scene of togethers beginning.

Cities on Fire

So I begin again, at Highgate’s steps
in placid form, stone storm shapely
as ever against the backdrop of
Marxian prose, summery nightsweat dew.

Draw out the plastic scrap change pieces,
the starring signposts of two-bit money
changer habit, grubby half-pence
sentiments clutched as wish-well piece.

Vanish the pleasantries of passion
past, supposition of royal garden
verandas, the cash-clang of Tesco
self-service booths: they make only echoes.

True, still, they burrow damp,
take a kind of parlor room’s
mystery as their fun,
forever smothering that reflected sunshine.