My poems are getting old

My poems are getting old
Full of yellowed moments
With torn edges
Where I have sought to hold
Or edit.
Full of traced paths back
Down the slope, away
From this glade
With its liminal thickets
Its trickling brook.
Full of thoughts and comparisons
To books and lessons
Massaging regrets into
Existential letters
Addressed to the weather
In the absence of lovers
My poems are getting old.

This East - VI

Eastwards

Glass mountains give way to concrete foothills

Tarmaced ravines and rivulets of brick

Wire fronted shops and paint peeled sills

Analogue aerials like tribal sticks.

How long will those armies wear Petticoats

And other civic Victoriana

Now the conduit of Commercial Road bloats

With bodies, traffic, it chokes. In summer

The ancient stench from delicate sewers

Gagging as from great glass cliffs tumbles

A weight of shit they were not built to bear

And always underneath the ground rumbles.

Later, some will ask what it is we did

And they will ask who built the pyramids.

This East

I.

When paved and terraced streets I paced to school

Bounded all the tall known world then nowhere

Was without magic.

In red brick maqui, arches and ivy

I sought out alleyways, spells and witches

Cavorted by time machines and made merry

On a pitch built of patches and stitches.

In science at school we had a lesson

The teacher did TA in holiday blocks

On the half daft doctrine of succession

That swamp becomes forest, and this east clots.

Steel girders form the vanguard, staking space

Lancing the static swarming red brick sea

Above the parish' frail pensioned terrace

Over old walls; and while I sipped my tea

Carped about starting, procrastinated

My old landmarks were assassinated.

II.
And interred unheard from in unmarked graves

Plyboard hoardings like police lines hide crimes

Hide ochre pits, dust, grit and wounded clay

An economic guard, silent as mimes.

Move along, move along, there's nout' to see here.

Again a kid out of the underpass

Bewildered and lost under soaring sheer

Cliffs, once muck and brick, now towering glass.

Ape batteries, story upon story

In which men at desks are seen to look down.

Mirrors held to the Old Lady's glory

As engorged she weighs the weight of the Crown.

Her table bursts its belt and belches out

Over Barbican, Aldgate, East and South.

III.
When the flock had forsook our parish church

It lay idle till on one autumn night

Feral vandals set it blazing alight

As flames ate beams like they were twigs of birch

My mother ran in to save the bible.

After that it became flats, luxury

And Starlings stopped filling the four Plane trees

Once, there, playing cards I scarred my nostrils.

Roaming away from wide straight Roman roads

To the winding sheep tracks down by St.Pauls

Where buildings clustered like pilgrims with loads

You can hear brick scream, as clan by clan falls

The old yard's children, each slowly eaten.

Oblivious progress strides slums with lead feet.

IV.

After the scouts, forms a phalanx of glass

Looming over bowed ranks of cornered brick

Levels of a lost co-operative past

In this east the new dawn is rising, quick.

At Bishopsgate steel of imperial scale

Belittling people, the streets, the sheep

Tracks stacked with tall testaments and tiled

Mausoleums to corporate fiefs.

On worn keystones there is calligraphy

Statements left for us with care in the course

But this age speaks in its geometry

An implicit understanding of force.

With futures and interests and asks and bids

This epoch too builds pyramids.

V.

Eastwards, in the garden behind the George

If you buried fingertips into brick

Left blood in the cracks you could scale the walls

To the roof, look out over the city

Along the Lea sclerotic industry

Budlea capped patches of necrosis

Have lost the war and succumbed to disease

Boxed and shipped like bits of Acropolis.

Armies have won with modern logistics

Undone anywhere things were stored or made

With the autistic force of statistics

The shopkeeper's wide-eyed workshops are razed

Men may not scale these alien spaceships

And nature find nowhere to seed or to sit.

VI.

Eastwards

Glass mountains give way to concrete foothills

Tarmaced ravines and rivulets of brick

Wire fronted shops and paint peeled sills

Analogue aerials like tribal sticks.

How long will those armies wear Petticoats

And other civic Victoriana

Now the conduit of Commercial Road bloats

With Mercury's priests, it chokes. In summer

The ancient stench from delicate sewers

Gagging as from great glass cliffs tumbles

A weight of shit they were not built to bear

And always underneath the ground rumbles.

Later, some will ask what it is we did

And they will ask who built the pyramids.