& to be again by toxic draffs
its soil burdened with arsenic & mercury
near the access point a large white marquee underinks
lauded codas & coiffed fingers burnt plastic
tetches off this cloud remade again
an image shrinks to some super-totem inverted fascia
runs on teflon like cutting to your breathing
a faintly baited linchpin
inclines burgundy bottles
with regimental ties for wicks,
the Prince of Darkness Molotov Astras
1999 moving forward a beacon to the world
into the richness of the British character. Ergo.
Creative. Compassionate. Outward looking.
a triumph of confidence over cynicism,
boldness over blandness,
excellence over mediocrity
harped, cupola one withering blimp
settled at the mouth of the peninsula,
Britannia strays dragging over shingle
it vanished complex tangles
what invented future means in shining leaden water.
& you float back into Enterprise Culture
etched onto its scrying glass spectrally,
extruded into deadlands
the last council-operated high-rise block red eyed
& everyone is left on carcinogenic marshes
a Chairman’s haircut congeals in correction fluid,
& the sun atop the dome dances in the moonlight
O when that moon is big & bright
it's a supernatural delight,
when everybody is dancing in the moonlight!
the clashing oars are needle grown
out of HM Government but we ignore it.
Sorry is the hardest word
but you learn from your mistakes remember
you just like walking around its intrepid fantasy
with elbows in the topiary garden dancing to
the architecture of moonlit colonnades,
the custodial moonlit amphitheaters, the moonlit
night-club interiors as designed by Edwin Lutyens
on old drugs & re-thought as a underground bungalow
& exit into anti-ligature moonlit prisons
with calico print on the walls
a low octane hallucination gets disinterred
from the toxic soil to be put in an airgun
& shot out at the menagerie rotating
in the middle of the three story high complex
diminishing until nobody is left,
affordable plastic-clad buildings shaped like a Rubik’s Cube
on the stated aims of the TMO & Client aspirations
endorsed subcommittees from cantilevered platforms
narrowing to scalloped edges
yellow spikes from heaven drop like arrows
on logarithmic scales breaks shivered & skived
there is no door but a sort of oval flap,
a mellow opening tripped into flashes of
your behavioural map, sunk its token bent out of shape
but allowed to pass down a long sequences of spaces
eventually hitting the Vent-Axia & crumpling into a opening
in the arm of a giant figure that was a zone
based on the human body, this zone
then divided by language, gender, & skin colour
& what appears to be blood
with visible blood cells
being pumped around the floor & walls.
What is left. Shimmering lenticular titles,
standing the height of the Stature of Liberty
an interactive scanner that would appear to find parasites on the volunteers body & multiply them. Large scale hair covering the ceiling, parasites moving through the hair
doing a Tommy Cooper routine.
The curving plasterboard wall is indented
with crosses each one carrying a TV screen in its centre
& then more, gently scouring the corners
‘the blessings of Tony Blair’ plays
behind burnt public sector workers a private door.
& the best picnics are on Agars Plough,
by The Brocas how can you forget massive gazebos
Moet out the proverbial bucket!
subsequent decades in variant forms across
the city including the redevelopment of
its buried strata of contamination
representing another kind of heat
a zone within a zone; a cylinder of How Shall I live?, night rain
a series of barriers & check-points
its infinitely distant far ended luminous watch-dials,
buried in cesspits on the site to be opened
some point in the nearing future
in some unspecified field
or else facing a rapidly violent descent
into the realms of anonymity, no forgotten people
in an undercroft a nuclear light singeing
madness, or early death
to new entrepreneurial micro-billeted polymers
now counts as a skin, as a face its complex gyration
in brownfields the cashflows to cowabunga pipelines
pushing ever upwards into a toxic pyramid,
there are perks in chains of lead you can feel it.
