Poem

In your shadow

This is a concrete poem in the shape of Canary Wharf, so I would rather email it to you as a Word document so as to keep the shape. Let me know...

shadow
your
In

O
wharf,
your flash-wink
Panopticons me on my Bow
balcony. Epileptic urethra! Our new
silent bells. I am but one sick louse at your base.

Aspirant arrow, we still can’t match your aim.
Our lego trains should daily piston sacrificial
workers through vertical veins straight up your
carapace to your apex, let them glitterfall down. O
shine, future bird coop, for Poplar’s Bangla Business
BAs who wish to switch their council nests for berths
in your 12 volt battery. I know two Ballards who chose
to rent your shadow and aren’t even City. Jog with me,
alone, through Heseltine streets, through anodyne
weekends empty as the early ‘90s. The ice cream vans
skirl out of your eyeline. Every once in a while your
star spouts, glass Leviathan, recalling the smoke from
lofty M.D.s’ cigars, as if you shroud yourself from hoi
polloi eyes. The architects knew: ‘We design it, the
right builds it, the greed/hope herm, that Janus patron
face, opens it; and left-wing writers denigrate, & thus
validate it in the eyes of our buyers, adding value free
of cost’. I can’t decide if, analogy-wise, the HSBC &
citigroup buildings, louring henchmen, should be your
balls, or the dangling dewlap of the Isle of Dogs, where
Henry’s hounds barked out across the river at the womb
of his palace Placentia, to Greenwich where Boleyn was
deleted, the kingdom’s fertility curetted by regal
impatience. Yet where, later, time itself was gestated,
brought up, exported: the certitude of longitude, world
wide and clockwise from the opposite docks. Tick tock the
time-zones pink! Rotherhithe, Latherhithe, Rawhithe,
Tithehithe. Opine, opiate opus, for your backyard allotment,
Limehouse; we imported green yellow lemons, to chew, suck
dry, export yellow peril novels. Even before you rose,
your docks shot the white pus smallpox through the water’s
air to the four corners, but that the red carriers now
termiting your veins are often sickle-celled is of no
concern to you, you’ll hardly flop. With that Dome for
your tranny Amazon show-tit, with City airport as your
bow launching aluminium Cupid-arrows of economics, how
could you ever lack new lovers? This is the body commercial,
even when sick you are proud. Politics is but your lymph.
Sneeze; the world will catch on. We’re your night watchmen
without passkeys. Squint, eye on pyramid on dollar; lazy
Pharos. Painted by fountains, clad by artworks, moated by
boutiques; at dusk you lcd, in fog you iceberg, in sleep
you mushroom. Light the east’s small kids as they sleep,
impassive BFG. Let me dream soundly knowing, no matter its
indifference, something big is watching me. Pulse on my alarm
clock, prism, totem, prison, tomb.

Richard Tyrone Jones
London, UK

Richard Tyrone Jones has run 'Utter!' spoken word for five years, been published in Trespass, Rising, the Delinquent and Tales of the Decongested, performed at the Hackney Empire and Soho Theatre and published his first book, 'Germline'. His poetry plays with form, irony and layers of totemic meaning.

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