Grenwegian Blues

Greenwich, you gorgeous and big-statued suburb
of indigo, orange and furlongs of green,
where arsonists kindled a jettyside hubbub
with boat-lovers stoking the billowing scene.

Who did it? Some landlubber band who’ve decided
that mankind can never do anything good
on the ocean? Oh, poor old ship cruelly ignited,
Cutty Sark, fashioned from Grenwegian wood!

Some pine like a parrot who’s missing its homeland
but I grew up somewhere just six miles due north
so, back to the plumes and shrugging, I roam land
with plague-pits beneath it, sauntering forth.

I saunter past violins crashing round columns
and domes from some curly-wigged century, stalls
where incense and glitter are sold in large volumes
to buxom young ladies with South London drawls,

past buildings named after a sweet-faced drug-dealer
whose killers were guessed to be racists, not rivals;
whose Daily Mail background made his death look realer
than murderees whose memories receive no revivals.

Along Cade and Wat Tyler Roads, by the heath,
a fox-dotted Eden that blooms in my heart,
I roam around cyclists and acorns, beneath
a laser beam maybe once could’ve been art.

This electric green shaft, I’ve been told, they shoot out
to mark a meridian ripe for the staring.
Why then, do they frequently shift it about?
People must lose themselves, lacking their bearing.

My home is decrepit and just dwarfs a rabbit-hutch.
Morven, my flatmate, shoots Nazis all day.
Our ubiquity makes it the case we can’t grab at much
privacy, both in the other one’s way.

His alarm-clock wakes me at seven each morning,
so I have to stand bashing pans by his bed.
No telly or Internet offers us warning
and newspapers rarely, if ever, are read.

Over and over these floorboards I bellowed
at light-fittings, “Why?” and “This doesn’t make sense!”
as your bulwark of silence engulfed as you yellowed
and still you refused to extend recompense.

I frothed at the mouth and I schemed like a blaggard,
no more my own captain and sunk by a wall,
as seven miles northwest you tutted and swaggered
as though you had no part to play in it all,

my redheaded red-flaggy poetess soulmate
you never can be, since you never will heal
from the sickness that chases you from Reason’s tollgate
and poisons your talent to love and to feel.

Silence envelops the cause of your silence.
No-one can take in your psychotic truth,
or see why my dreams lie, like dispossessed migrants,
destroyed on the floor with my vanishing youth.

And no-one can see that I can’t just pick lovers,
like everyone else seems to do, off the trees,
because I’m alone in a world full of others
who might as well speak to me in Cantonese.

And no-one remembers the decade of loneliness
twisting and burrowing into my brain,
since families, friendships – humans – don’t notice
or worry themselves with another man’s pain.

I’m marooned in a vast, uninhabited period
in which you toppled the masts of my mind,
an echoing moment I cannot call really good,
point to or navigate or leave behind.