City of a zillion migrant dreams, moist,

pent up by fading wagers, conspiring how

to move and filch a dime and trade, barter

and pawn at freedom

Like then, like now, harsh shelter and refuge

of the refugee – London,

of restlessness, historic pomp and often, poise-

maze of intricate webs taunting desire

whether in damp red-brick and soot-smeared lane or

tree-lined mansion, taunting, taunting desire

always the latest, hairdo or rivet and bolt,

from ancient plants and workshops of the worldly

world, customising guns or smithing sounds

fancied ballistics from the press, desktop

or stadium, ever swarming with prols drawing pollen

from electric wires who all dream

that the calendar has stopped in an unceasing past

and moan how history has overbrimmed your banks.

Trading city of a zillion trades and megastores

cramped-up remains of empire, where forever searching

no one has seen a Londoner, save on TV, where Jolyon

Forsythe beat Phileas Fogg at whist, where no one

can trace a feeling, in the façade of careless

class and order from the warehouse to the hawkers’

market – last urban refuge of the punk and of the urban shock

whose Mohawk hair winks electric at icy winds up-down the Thames

taunting too, taunting desire – a tired image still, un-shocking

to the somnambular crowds in-outing the caverns of subway stations

Place of the harshest opiates whether in angel wings

or of the inhale-exhale from dens that defy description

cramped-up space for the stowaways stacked up in hulks

trucked in the fridges of transcontinental lorries

Destroyer of writers, shedding ink to outline your soul

Confused that everything solid is pure liquefaction and

that the river Thames is your only solid structure – and there:

at the warehouse by the warf, among the silent cranes

we hear the Banker's melancholy sigh among amassing

stacks and rows of succulent, exotic fruit.

What now Mr. Blake? Have you been gone from these

thrice-chartered streets, what do we make of woes

within these zillion migrant dreams, taunting, taunting desire?

What of the war clouds hasting across a casual sun?

What of the bombs at King's Cross or at Altergate

How many migrant dreams did they implode?