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The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze
He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme.
Rousing from reverie barely in time
Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays
Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown,
To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end
Between the shabby flats where it cuts through
To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he
Must brave declining visibility
Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into
The shadowed valley of the psalm descend
Through a despond of debt and cancelled dole,
The acrid scent worse further down the ramp.
He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom
Only to misstep in the gathering gloom
And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp
The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole.
He calls himself by an unflattering name
Then slogs on amongst peeling Bauhaus slums,
Making for where the high-rise windows glow
From sombre violet altitudes and so
Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes,
Scraping one foot behind him as though lame
And, too late, suffering anxiety
About his bald host, whom he barely knows,
Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound
Like the most selfless altruist around.
Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes,
Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe,
But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass
