city sacraments or songs

City Songs:

Just a quick
Step
And through sliding doors
Like teeth biting down
On easily digestible
Fast city tube food
Like me
Quickly looking around and choosing a seat.
There are walkmans
Like Wittgensteins
Beetles in a box
Wires crossing cheekbones
There is a singing man
Cheery and beery
Expansive inside
Our tube
a girl
too much lipstick and beautiful eyes
Crossed arms we all touch
Shoulders and ruffle papers
Mutter
And listen to others conversations
In judgement.
Aimlessly it seems sometimes
The stations rattle by.
Places I know by their signs from below ground
Their steps upwards and people coming down
Stops and starts
Tannoys and and and and me
Onwards

Occasionally
some staccatto quick steps
some jitters
and people passing
in night mode.
hoods up, caps on
arms swinging
or crossed.
occasionally some
back alleys
rectangular shapes
pipes and steam
restaurant workers smoking break time
cigarettes
in the dim.
yellow street lamps
bulbous
hang suspended
from private frames
in a private delight,
glow
not far extending
not much including
like spoilt toddlers
clasping their toys
as mother night calls us to bed.
occasionally clusters
of kurds
turks
jamaicans
poles
outside bars with music trespassing
onto the street
with glee
shaking heads and laughing
in other tongues.
occasionally a road crossed
poste haste
white on the one hand and red on the other
never seeing
all moving
stopped by other
vertical red
for me, going home.

The city swallows you
From the approach on the train
Inwards
Wreaths
Smoke haloes
Tighten as you struggle
Like modern military
Plastic handcuffs
Get a grip.
Don¡¯t fight it
Surrender
The rain spitting on old streets
New people
Balkan beggers headscarves and
Ornamental babies
Sympathy
Is dead
I thought
As I averted my gaze
Clusters of machismo
Taunt
The girls in tight jeans
Fifteen or so
Somehow, faces look like they are
Chiselled
From flint. Urbanity, yet;
No one is urbane
Just jaded, polluted, tired, scared
A casual gesture
Of camaraderie
Offering the paper you¡¯ve finished reading
to your neighbour
In the tube
Elicits a startled jerk
Suspicious glance
And several seconds of scrutiny before they
Realise
There are no ulterior motives.

The city has ulterior motives though
The city wants you as its own
Foreign bodies
Objecting to the city system
Planting grass on their designated
Parking place
Are swiftly repelled
No more nighttime jams
On rooftops
Tiles a¡¯clattering
Noise pollution
Acid rain
Even my poems
Have been co-opted
Urban laments
Eulogies?
The city hears me as singer
Scrive
Royal historian
Soviet airbrusher
Of official photos

The Metro tells tales of
War and blood in distant lands
Perchance
My neighbours family
Screaming at night
With the caterwauls of stray cats
outside
Acknowledge this violence
And are racked with grief
Perhaps
The old man,
is not keeping up with the rent
And the plastic guns of the kids on the block
Echo, like a shadow song
War
We all fought
Once.