Metropolitan

Metropolitan

 

I.

 

Atlantic harbinger of this our swaddled dawn:

Mistaking moon's sea sweep for this the frown

The sky's plain-countenanced creatures maytimes weep

Upon the surface-sundown of our lawn,

When gaily surfaced for mute festivals…

At their revues of lazing, sharing same

In sweat with dewdrops that no tears bequeath-

 

Paint iron circles on this Glasgow heath,

If you do not truly disinherit me;

I am not the prophet you are that I flee,

But I was born in the same cloud-clown as your own

And must, like Dumbness, recognise your throne

Upon the shriek and lull that also disinherits me.

 

O Whitman, Swinburne, strangely looking down

 

Upon the purple lengths that flood the gloom,

Come purply to me, disinherit whom

Does not, on this strange sudden Glasgow night

Does not ensurface on your symmetry.

The Mettle fins of this Clyde bridge ring true

The same as yours, but do not ring as bright

As April moths upon your midmoon night,

That knows but does not know of this the flee

 

Of twilight ridges bridging into cobalt dreams

The Green by the distillery is dumbest to,

Almost as much as we ourselves, as I..

But other colours plumb through numbness now,

And skies

Prodigally heaping like the frowns

Of Odin's neighbours Aphrodited likewise-

The spoor of covert stars and radial revues

Pavillion keeps for the unkept below their cradles…

Ejaculate their triumphs

And their fears

Without discerning-

   BUT THERE ARE NO NEIGHBOURS HERE.

Speak platitudes upon your nearest lawns,

And do not dream yourselves chimeras, for the drift

Of festive flesh resolves to its own doorways.

I mean yours-

But skies,

That heap the Turner's painting at the last point down,

Commit your eye's leap utter into frown,

Commit the last length of the last sigh's beat

The late snow keeps, but do remember us.

 

II.

 

Like Lowry, each pram pusher and each rake whose face

Distinguishes itself like passport transit and no pawn

Or quite content to play the knight, in stage or place

Their upcast visors pass no comment on-

Both leans and does not lean here: streetway bums,

Postmodern yuppies hooked to mortgages

As surely as a dipsomaniac's drip,

And tanned young wantons frowzied trim and flip,

The tinsel queens and hardened cardboard sages…

This is the sum of lipless images

Whose tongues run staunchest at the point they stall…

 

And do their eye-stalks stalk upon the wall

Whose high clock's apex-iron eyelashes

Split either density of light, and sightlessness

They hardly notice, or has this noontide twilight be-

     come no more than urine's musk or ambergris

That leaks past one bleared out or one painted eye. Do hope

There lies something more close below this. Rusted cars

Are not within the satellites of rusted minds.

Commuters crashing into staid routines

That neither lives or leaves by. Recompense us

For all our sweat and piss and smell of fox-

Transcribing faces to those forms in ferverous dark,

Made heedless for the ardour of the prize.

We flagellate our second solstice in the hours

Whose seconds bleed us, chords of the same clocks

Whose images themselves are deadened eyes.

 

 

III.

 

 

IT's 12 ‘O CLOCK….THE HEAPING LINES

OF YOUNG EMBRACERS SHUFFLE THROUGH THE DOORS

Of nightclubs and of escalator palace

Equally, but some are lacking cheques-

A sea of mobiles granting a reprieve

From the monotony of needing such: have I

Or you one? Cheap Armani knock-offs

Speak volumes for their quiet profligacy.

 

“Yet have you got spare change?”....Wet pussies and hard cocks

Deny the ruffian waiting by the phone booth;

Cash machines redeem the emptiness

For only a split second from their eyes.

…The advertisement billboards mock the broken clocks

Whose shadow lasts a second or has passed

Into that point no second shadow passes.

Yet we have no need to recognise this fact.

“It's 12 ‘O Clock I only ask for change”…

 

A beer can stationed at the Civic Centre

Speaks volumes for its dash below the wall-

We ask for city stamps at vacant ticket boxes,

Relinquishing our arts for stumps of change.

"And then, then fragilely, I ask you why

You saw your band mates last", and the more muscled cry

Rumples inanimately up from passing buses…

IT'S TEN TO MIDNIGHT PEOPLE, WONDER WHY…

 

And wonder, passing in the unborn rain…

“I never asked once more to have you back again”…

LAST ORDERS….and it's sovereign and sweet

To walk a circuit in your love's retreat,

To feel the hulk of your hypocrisy…

A lie the truth of you that does not lie-

 

DEMOCRACY…

Oh, yes it scrapes within.

 And that's a FACT-

FOR SOAP ABRADES THE SKIN.

The street-long placards always speak the truth,

A conscience virtuous as your newborn ruth

That vanishes when souls forget to fly,

In learning to, when you've resumed your Act.

 

It is the time now for the garbled skies

The next year scrapes on the lobotomies

Of vagrant issues and a shriven crime-

IT's 12 ‘O CLOCK, SO HURRY UP IT's TIME.

         Lord, look on us and then look back again,

         From greystone high-rise and from lapis lawn

         The sequinned people parrot in their harp-song time,

          Unaware the music makes them live as long

          As all that leaves them to return again

          To sapphire gardens, and the grafts of men

 

Return your circle, Lord…

Amen, Amen.