Gentrified

In the early days when they facelifted the city,

I drove back north into the maze they made of it,

driving through places I never knew,

expecting whole streets that were gone,

walking along the done up avenues

that seemed too good to be true 

and tapping the concrete to see

if the ghostly cobbles still remained beneath.

The organs of a city regenerate

according to the rulers' whims,

the intestines of its avenues bypassed and changed,

whether for life saving or cosmetic reasons no-one says,

though those who stay as well as return

wander through the improvement maze

dazed and disconnected with even the recent past.

I walked with my old father through the renovated  pretty city,

lost is semi familiarity, thinking it somehow too clean,

gleaming, ghostless, for the likes of us,

catching a few scents from the previous incarnation,

seeing those around suspecting the same 

as they faltered through the shopping halls,

new monuments barely settled on their foundations.

These faces, made out of remembered moulds,

but sold or subverted in a strange place.

And one man, marked out more than other,

who voiced it out of dementia or unease,

randomly approaching all and sundry,

saying how cold he was, coatless

(but really meaning how lost),

saying how glad he wore his scarf

(that wasn't there),

pulling at the spectral comfort of it

around his neck.