Shop Fronts

London's brilliant
if you take away complaint and moan,
extract that which turns all poetry to prose,
the metre killers
of playing tennis without the net.
How sad it seems to make it all financial,
about nothing more than how I want to live
and sod the rest,
all how to turn all to painful jokes
and knee-jerk cliché you cannot analyse
or even understand.

Here is a weekday high street,
sun glancing on the pavement,
on the day I can first be sure.
my eyes are failing,
as the small print on my sandwich
races me to the edge of space,
red-shifted to a standstill.

I am railing against the cool tonight,
in streets of platitudes and drink.
Here I meet people known to me,
those on the list for here and there,
and my brain swallows them.