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With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be:
Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way,
Offering dreamtime and a place to stay.
An unaccustomed surge of urgency
Propels Den out into a tired rose light
From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled,
Across worn flags that vandal time deletes
Where names and mortal numbers disappear,
Erasing status, sentiment, and year.
Dead information sulks beneath these streets
And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld
Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate,
The war memorial’s black memo-spike,
Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls
When nightmare faces trickle on its walls,
Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like
Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate
Then over Marefair, observed with disdain
By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see;
White hair and beard, officious little sod.
A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod,
He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally
As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane
Towards a new low and a legal high.
Why did he come here to pursue his goal?
These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair,
Here to a town that nutted off John Clare
Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul.
These are the yards where sonnets come to die
As with the local poet he’d been shown,
