DEAD RECKONING WITH RED-BRICK BUILDING
Those gaping dawns seen only
from slip roads or fly-overs
above still-sleeping suburbs.
Perfect to pass and blink as
sunlight strikes the newbuilds’ glass.
What if reading now is like
hearing classical music?
Somehow obsolete, glories
all behind, distractions to
cover tigers' closing tracks -
wild lives, sprinting to catch us -
nearly here in this stupor.
Dead mother on his shoulder,
watching angrily as he
surfs the pale pornography
of empire, rushing back to
smash the red-bricks beckoning,
awaking then reckoning.
..He howls through hollow halls of history, sick with sand and sinning.
Each pixel a ghost of conquest, flicking, thinning,
The past curls smoke-like round his clenched desire,
Fuelling fists that crave ruin and fire.
I love the picture of the stoat, or whatever it is. You wrote something before about spacing-out looking at dead, maybe dismembered animals. Which I do when I see one: memento mori. But your's looks pretty perky.
The poem (which has disappeared from my browser windows) has more rhymes and word-play in iit, eg "angrily...pornography" or "beckoning...reckoning" than I've noticed before. Not in ANY sense a poetry buff me. But word-play I like. Plus, essential: stuff I just don't understand.