I would have thought it was pretty apparent by now
And our illuminated arch-backed
Railways
Don’t tell us why
And our gasping enclosures
New builds
Don’t tell us why
And our careful vigilantes
Men
Don’t tell us why
And our promised blowing clarity
Winds
Don’t tell us why
But Pablo Neruda
Tells us why
And we don’t so much as look at each other
Looking up to promises
And down to thoughts
Dressing to a flower-like predestination
Of private buffets
Harbouring immaterial desires for
Common diasporas
With these nobles all vanguished
Filling the jails and rehabs
When you’ve accepted your loved ones
Are victimised by some aristocrat’s invented necessity
And no it won’t do to pretend, bear out this, bitter as the stalk
Bitter as Freddy
Come with a strength of merciful project
Of fury set to justice
Courted, resorted
Forgiving, solitary crowd
Think again of train sets
Over brilliant cold welcoming hills
Or mournful priority
Or weighted footsteps
All clean for the strength of their
Rotten alcohol
Stretching your telescope for want of universal sight
You bar the land
And I can’t convey other
Than my vision aches,
But let me attest
A cherished assiduous tenderness
When your crutch becomes your bi-annual limb
The warmth of my life
The blood in my piss.
The French Revolution
Was where Dickens drew the line
And to the obviate
Top one hundred installers
Your great and central discourses
Don’t include me
And I hope they never do
Dear, they are your mistake
Words double round the fountain
One person’s invention
Is another person’s intervention
And seek no claim of higher permanence
Like climbing drainpipes
Nowhere
Nowhere
Charge with me
Hopeful, humble, provisional
Sure of disgrace
Charge
The gates of balmoral
For relief
For our time