Went Down West

I went down West, it was desert
Black bellied ravines of spartan stone
Washed clean like storm gullies after rain
A silence at the heart of this plague city
Regents street and Bond
A luminous donkey
A sleeping bag clutching scab fingered soul torn wandering man
And I, that was all
Cavendish, empty, Harley, Portland Place
In Berkley two young Arab girls went giggling
A teenage adventure on empty streets of Empires wealth.

This Tragic perestroika
The whole city was each of ours
My own carriage on the Tube
Two would be lovers could have had the steps of the National
But worried at the garden wall on situations
Two chicken grease fingered teenagers
Had all Trafalgars fountains in isolation
And everywhere on empty thoroughfares
Was the air of mourning.

They steal blocks now
Kidnap your sense of place
In silence and distraction
And where they are felling the old Planes
Our lungs, at Euston, a man said
"I'm just doing my job, I don't know nothing" #Arendt
By the bodies of dead trees. Trees which
If you haven't already heard
May have computational NOD-factor like proteins
In symbiosis at their roots, and by the bodies I replied
"That didn't wash at Nuremberg".