Why is everything see-through in the city?
Bars, cafes, shops, offices - all bare their naked witness to the contents inside
While wealth once chose to hide
Its faces from the masses
It has now found a more effective method of suppression:
Why disguise what you can make others want?
Show them,
Let them see what they could have,
Flaunt it to their willing eyes
And they will follow
The ringing of that hollow bell of 'want'
To their mass graves.

Don't get me wrong,
I don't think anyone is better off here.
Tell me the city suits floating
Like moths to the burnished flame of their local mall
Pulled into its glittering radiance after a long days'
Deathly work to find some comfort in consumption
At the blow-dry parlour or a watch glittering like a cricket in plastic grass
Aren't suffering like the rest of us.

There is no winning here.

Although it may appear that way to you
Through glistening expanses of blue-green
We're all/drowning/in this/sea of desire/together.


When I emerged from Wren's haven
(Imprint of ashes still traced in my skin)
I didn't know where I was.
I couldn't understand how I had come here from where I had been,
How the two could lie so close
To each other.
In this space.
One seemed so other
But not as I expected.
Raised all my life to believe in the tangible
Suddenly that was what seemed unreal,
Ungraspable in its absurdity
After the close communion of a ritual I could only ape,
And even then in disobedience.

How have we come to this place
Where we live in such
False freedom
Chasing our own tails
Consuming our energies
With mere consumption?

There is so much more




When we rejected that which rang false
We supplanted it with another idol.

Slavery is recognised by its outcomes,
Not its tones, it's overtures, it's address.

Where is our freedom not to live in *******
To money?
(That great power whom nobody controls and none can predict,
Which works in mysterious ways and gives us this day our daily bread.)

Why can't we live without it?
I hate this subservience / servitude it has imposed on us
Where every action word and meaning ends in its
Judgement / Answer

Where every day it's meaning grows
Even as it retreats from us in shadowed figures and
Ethereal locations;
Where each pound note is the holy scripture of our existence.

We live by its rules and none but it
Shall determine if we can enter
The Kingdom of Heaven

(That 5* Palace full of virgins).



I've never been to Las Vegas.
A mountain of money in a desert never held much appeal to me.