The Accord

Venomous grey sky
Absorbs all sunlight.
Contorted umbrellas rattle
In the wind,

Cool air surges hither and thither,
Engulfing bodies and lodging
In impotent cracks and
Weary flagstones.

Idle, mundane modernity, trench mud,
Artillery fire, the pounding machinery,
What placates you?

Barricaded and disenchanted: the soul
Submits, gently the boots wander, with lust
The neurons thrust

Metropolis. The lover’s hideaway, the gut
Of consumption, the liver’s retreat,
Lung-busting austerity.

Divine love and divine reliance wither
With the thinning shadow
And construct a fleshy
Potency,
A messy conception,

Mass and matter converge in a loveless cycle,
In the noiseless chamber,
Redundant streetlights line sedate streets,

Currency plummets, the city weeps, dead weight
Meets in the underground, flows and throes
Through tunnels and sewers,

Sexless and loaded with mankind,
Consumed with humanity. Equatorial fate,
The doomed, infinite curvature.
A stringy thread spreads.

Libraries combust, the leaders concur,
Books burn like brittle bodies in the crematorium
In the outposts the pubs close three a day,
Ale flows freely through the floorboards,
Through cold clay fossils

Rapid disintegration in the streets meets
Mass and matter. Venerated are the brave,
The rampaging and ransacked embrace in the grave
Why recoil in terror from love?

Lying forever carbonated in each other’s arms.

Ménage plans span the parallel tracks,
The rusty ring roads,
The governor leaps!
Mass integration, predatory leering,
The wanton shareholder
In giddy delirium.

Cracks traversing the tiles, the pavement,
The solemn blacked-out windows,
Dividing motorways
Destroying turbines and pylons.

Atoms bind blindly
In the bedroom.