Jerusalem

The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze

He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme.

Rousing from reverie barely in time

Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays

Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown,

To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end

Between the shabby flats where it cuts through

To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he

Must brave declining visibility

Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into

The shadowed valley of the psalm descend

Through a despond of debt and cancelled dole,

The acrid scent worse further down the ramp.

He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom

Only to misstep in the gathering gloom

And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp

The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole.

He calls himself by an unflattering name

Then slogs on amongst peeling Bauhaus slums,

Making for where the high-rise windows glow

From sombre violet altitudes and so

Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes,

Scraping one foot behind him as though lame

And, too late, suffering anxiety

About his bald host, whom he barely knows,

Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound

Like the most selfless altruist around.

Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes,

Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe,

But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass