Out of the cracked and winter-tangled
reconnoitres of the vantaged downs
the water winding to find water,
and the stacked and silted smoking enterprises
far and flat-sprawled
in their own yellow weather
seep on slime-trenched estuary.
There among warren;
among seven-level and the smoking bore
they build, the dawn-brave;
build their bulldozed deserts,
junction cul-de-sacked and sacked by yarders
hacking heaped wrecks.
There the sparrow patters
and the grey rail-grindings coat the brambles.
There they know though.
They are knowing there.
The bold young even know
and on the slabbed flights, doubling, write it.
Scrawled pre-stressing outs
such truth that whispered walk-way tunnels echo.
Canted girder badges sn******g bottles,
intimating better lies than telling,
and the carriage ads scratched carry messages :
what Mary did to Anna.
Something s**s here.
So much secret swells to burst
where greed-dewed, slide commuting eyes -
a study for shadows in their galleries -
To what a**embling genius the profit of compiling them ?
Over the scribbled clues the smoke-stained pore;
the countless with an audience of one;
their cathode god on tap
between the hours of labour and unconsciousness
whose final wisdom hints how to become
more blind than be invisible.
The luxury of decor pumped into their rooms:
a frame no bomber boxes out of,
but the gods be praised, the sour rain's eating in.
And on the tubes inscribed obscenities proclaim
that someone with a pen-knife knows.
And there will be an end to furnished harmony
and to the staging of their gestures.
With a s** as if the red-flowered sky were crumpet,
and a settling of brown railway filings
all their printed pretty painted walls
with shambles will be down
and they will wear their innuendoes and ensembles
where nobody watches.
This the frantic planets and the stars abhorring harmonies
and any subway oracle portends them
with p**nography's indifference;
that when out of the rat-lots the disorderly
pokes Sodom's rubber-fingers up their symmetries,
and pig tap-trotter echoes in the sewer system
sound throughout the porcelain of tubas
and their belch reeks scented water,
the displaced stars and the can-door hieroglyphics
will not focus then with any celebration.
But behind the station fences,
between workshops and can*ls it has been muttered
as the grit on ledges lies.
And in the centres it is everywhere
in darked and dazzled eyes.
Glitter of glitter where the surface troubles
where the tides meet.
Tarnish on glitter and the glitter's peel;
as bomb-flailed concrete in the underground
and blacked-out eating houses
full of lonely waiters and clean cutlery;
the merry-go-round darkened on the circuses.
The glitter oxidising
and the spangled rotting shrivelled on resisting bones.
And into the shadow between every lamp in three
they bustled in the knowing of corruption
too suppressed to be afraid.