Jerusalem

And thanks him, starting to walk off downhill

But looking back to find the stranger still

Observing him. Den, brunt of some cruel joke,

Calls helplessly “I was just up the pub”,

Then carries on down the long slope again,

Barefoot, skirting jewelled spreads of powdered glass,

To the T-junction at the bottom where

A single house stands near the corner there

Amid a great amnesia of grass,

Its presence making a stark absence plain

Yet with no clue as to whose residence

It is, its windows with closed curtains hung.

Beneath trees further on he takes a seat,

With freight-yards making the dressed set complete,

Where hunkered on damp grass he picks among

The lyric rubble of experience

In search of rhymes. The solitary abode

Stands punctuating the erased street’s end,

Closing a quote since lost to a mute past.

Lighting his cigarettes each from the last

Den lives and breathes and tries to comprehend

The dead man in his house just up the road,

That wonderstruck and milky gaze. He strains

At the idea of it; cannot begin

To analyse nor even quite define

How jarringly abrupt t

hat end-stopped line.

Life’s sprawling text shall not be bound within

The whale-boned Alexandrine or quatrain

But finds instead its own signature tread