Escalating down to Holborn, it struck:
never get the ones you want,
never want the ones you get.
I’m right tweed on wrong shoulders, old chap
(mind who you call “old”)
and in my pocket a full pack o’ smokes
but of bloody course – no light.

In morning commute we slide
off each other slick’n’smooth
like jet-black bodies of nuclear subs.
We are rust and trouble;
knowing it’s those smokes that’ll get us,
that wolves follow in our rush,
that it’s spiritual cocaine to be us;
knowing vice and knowing feast,
and death is of our troubles least,
as we’re in the belly of the beast;
knowing truth’s the Daily Mail,
and we’ll fight it tooth and nail,
knowing comfort’s scarce and frail;
knowing all this and knowing it all too well.

But yea, may the devil care! For I will still track
your bread crumb trail (as my guide light, or no light)
in dead night of towns and public houses:
“Pin(t)s an’ needles, all around!”
Weekends are live wire by the mile
that fuel the fires and the night clubs,
which are a feeding ground,
which are light to the moths
(light that’s phosphor, light that’s life!)
since surely I was built to burn
in my hunt for promises of flipside life:

smack syringes, which obsolete true love doth render,
found drowned in mojitos, buried in week-long benders,
cloaked in menthol smoke, alight in a Mayfair’s ember,
open arms sold in back alleys – for proper. legal. tender.
[upon exiting, check your smile and motives
please report all suspicious activity
even and especially that committed by yourself
please do not leave your dreams unattended at any time
and mind the gap
thank you]
With abandon, I enter the fray –
man, I don’t have a choice.

Zones 5 & 6 are out of the comfort zone
but if that’s where you are,
it’s where I’ll be too;
while drizzles onto London fall;
while Princess Di in her coffin rots;
while my Arsenal gathers dust;
while we play cat and mouse
and I’ve lost sight
of which of us is which.

I am a Legion foreigner, my eyes CCTV;
my fingerprints lay on Hyde Park’s skin
and I wrote my sins on street signs
with invisible ink.
My breath is that breeze
that shoots up the tube in our wake
and there, a thousand stops away
on a bench, she waits, for the Northern Line
and perhaps for me.