Jerusalem

With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be:

Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way,

Offering dreamtime and a place to stay.

An unaccustomed surge of urgency

Propels Den out into a tired rose light

From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled,

Across worn flags that vandal time deletes

Where names and mortal numbers disappear,

Erasing status, sentiment, and year.

Dead information sulks beneath these streets

And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld

Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate,

The war memorial’s black memo-spike,

Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls

When nightmare faces trickle on its walls,

Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like

Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate

Then over Marefair, observed with disdain

By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see;

White hair and beard, officious little sod.

A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod,

He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally

As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane

Towards a new low and a legal high.

Why did he come here to pursue his goal?

These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair,

Here to a town that nutted off John Clare

Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul.

These are the yards where sonnets come to die

As with the local poet he’d been shown,