babylondon [page 2]

Word is not the engine of power
and the bone of governance is not thought.
Its blood is force
and discourse hides its face.

Beside the shore at Menchen How,
it was not what we thought it was –
a rope,
a loop of hawser.

Somebody’d made it, something broke it,
everything lost it.
Than the useful grown useless
nothing more naked.

Dead leaf and daffodil blowing
of a March that goes on,
large as light,
the blister-bud,

lamblion long.
The growth bidden
in the cold blast
bloodied,

another bloodied
March. Venus walks
in stone-
desert camouflage.

Gresham’s grasshopper, gilt over Lombard Street
making no music for workers below
on the hill that’s been built her of stone
where the old one’s laying their eggs.

Of how things work
will I know enough well
to make one small novel
to move convincingly

the people about
when I was younger thought.
Or do they?
Penhaps a trick all is it.

So passing Prudent Passage
which arches overhead entirely
tiled in white
I’m in the dark and there again

but am I?
Define yourself,
the products tell their products,
Go create.

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