No Way out. Exit through Oxford Circus.
Round and Round/ in for a penny
Exit through
Leicester Square Paddington
St Pancras – exit through the back of your head
on a Thursday, of all places.
Silent dogfight. Children of the Worm. The knives come out at night
the knaves are faeries, the queen’s a bitch. Spread all across the world
is her litter, gathered slowly back into the British Museum
to steep, like tea.
For me to come to rest in such a time and space I would need to spin
like a giant clustered engine holding all my insides tight
everything I own very close
and let it all out very fast
in a violent exaggerated swing
of the arms
a dizzying christ in product-haze
a platter of worth that hovers in server-cloud
somewhat poised above the ground as film
the negatives in after-burn.
For me to come to rest, to find a way in – there is no way in.
Virtually everyone here is owned. Tinfoil on the steeple towers.
The fingers of rowers blistered to bone.
Immigrants and labourers
the whole wide world, once plundered, now throned.
Virtually everyone here is owned. Dethroned. On a daily basis
you could travel without moving as the rest of the planet
spins around you like a top.
Like a 15th Century Priest carrying the Voice of the Sun
in his breast. Like a destroyer
sailing up the Thames
the runes of a lesser city would have
settled, as serbian killing fields, cambodian killing fields,
ice upon mud upon ice upon bone,
have done and be done
in the ashes and hitler’s vice, but this is not the case
nor the time nor the place. Face against the glass
and a girl blowing kisses.
Here come the Bastards to the Royal Albert Hall;
first insertion into trappist monasteries.
Beer garden dreams –
aboveground googlemaps/ underground signalblackout,
the wind before the train, the deadstare of strangers,
smartphones, newspapers, kindles.
A city built on flames,
in tunnels.
No Way out. How many bankers does it take to plug an oil well?
Not very many. About 5. If you insert them just so.
The Queens Route is not the trade route, is not the spice route
is not the slave trade, is not the hatching of globalisation
following the french and american revolution.
No, each morning she plants the same piece of ass
on the same rattan chair and starts the oily cogs
again, the parsimonious negotiations, acquiesces
new world arbitrations while her sons and grandsons
and vassals dither gathering coin and tossers.
Penal detention codes come in many guises
acts of salary destruction / what a world in which to live
virtually, periodically. Piccadilly.
Burger King. Watch the caged bird
sing in silence, the lesser corruptions
Exit through another manic station…
capricious shoppers /
It goes deeper than that.
To the primal fear.
To the core.
It’s not as if you’re the last man on the midnight meat train
It goes further than that.
Much further.
Your chances of escape have been reduced to:
nought. Zero.
You could spend your entire life moving round in circles,
hamsters on a string swinging in long forgotten
childhood closets
And you would never know, traveling as you do,
all over the world and nowhere. Nothing.
Nada.
The primal fear.
The core.
No way out. Exit through the birth channel. Exit through the trees.
Exit through the knees of your mother into the shadowy eclipse
glimpsed once before and reduced to nought. Zip. Zilch.
Filth.
It’s in the wind that suddenly hammers down the chute
carrying memories and dust from above the ground
the wind that is slowly inexorably reeled
back beneath the wheels.
Whether you get in, get out,
there’s no way out.
There is the endless reeling forever
chasing the darkness
and chasing the cause
the prime number – the door.
Exit through the rear of the building;
exit clean through the middle.
And the search continues – the search for worth
for first
for last chances that have been
inevitably reduced, all to nought
to nothing. To this.
People filter you out. When there’s no way out.
People stare right through you.
Not to the otherside
no such grander scheme exists.
Instead they see the anterior wall that holds
their dreams and wants and needs in check
the darker recesses of our greater fears
our primal cores sans batteries.
A black plate from which all the real and possible
feasts of the world
have been insistently removed.
And we see in the surface a mirror of the self, sans appetite
sans direction
comic sans the gaiety
reason sans the voice. A circus of the self
for the shopping spiral to enact paths
no consumer consensus could readily reflect
no marketing method encapsulate
no budget or method contain.
Self or otherwise. The otherworldly serf.
No Way out.
Exit through Oxford Circus.
Round and Round/ in for a penny
Exit through Leicester Square
Paddington
St Pancras.
Exit through
the back of your head
on a Thursday,
of all places.