#hogarth
I am no philosopher
I am Paul from The Meadows
pulled skinny poor from the shadows to put a deal of fat on his bones
so how did I end up here?
what penalty did I accrue?
taking the ten point deduction for conduct unbecoming
I place my attention deficit on re-order that I don’t yet forget
smothered in the scrim of this Hogarthian hood every chip toothed blue scriptured face
proffers passage to a poisonous but tantalising hook
to write the junk must I taste the junk?
peddled or paddled for a sweeter flight this avenue never taken,
hedonic ingress unwalked, unwanted yet still wondered
could such deep surrender be so sweet to allow the most intimate of plunder?
am I Dante?
corralled around the streets
of a society that shows no compromise amongst the dying embers of fallen enterprise
eternal damnable gyres around a fucked **** pyre
of concrete, glass and broken humanity
with each uttered breath a cold cocktail of profanity
the bouncing soles of the air I wear may ease me over the gummed archipelagos
flag spij-speckle guaran islands slab secure and fast
against the counselled wash an eternal fossilised chaw
that resists the fiercest chemical blast
lost in this sea I cannot be but shaken by the waxy man with his head of startled hemp and coterie of cracked carbon
as he breaches the domestic brink
turning a key, his shoulders hunched in protective shawl against
the spittled spate
he stares back through me
for sightless miles insides out, front to rear, then scuffles, rattling, townwardly
cannot resist the insecticidal compulsion of the green and white purgatory
where the neatly stacked wash of fluorescence makes oven ready your heaven
amid the threnodial thrum of
a hundred syncopated Siemens
following that shuffling cortege of the bussed in dead and dying
I am dutiful, altar bound, avowed and accursed the host with the ghosts in this haunted mall lost and lonely within England’s mountain green
it is no longer the god bothering needles and blunts that draw the crowds
as flat screened pharmacological rapture,
that trinity of distilled, medicated caffeination
lead a once pious nation through a precocious dream
maybe Allah yet sees here his
Jerusalem and leads his children
upon England’s land of crescent green
Dec 3, 2016
Dec 3, 2016 at 1:16 PM UTC