I’m eating astral lunches in the naked madhouse
and walking in cigarette guilt haze of loneliness, fear, death,
then in childish terror and dizziness following distant mothers
in circles round blocks of satanic flats stark against blank sky
dusk of all horror, urgently shaking consciousness
free of itself to float above me
Now passing through on motorway London behind me
your letters in boxes all piled into car I watch as rush of
faceless Home Counties flat expanse passes me drive on drive on
my poems are stretched – Yorkshire at the pole I’m lost,
you in Canterbury where Chaucer spreads his demon wings
with medieval glare that we returned in hungover study of dead Tales,
Ibby to Langley, Aymen to Ilford, where psychic hands of home
won’t stop cracking the mind’s bones over their backs,
and in Thailand distant where Harvey fights to feed
English into the spitting mouth of the selfie generation,
Bloomsbury, sitting in café with museum in back it’s all a front
for the plotting of the resurgence of 1940s Hasselblad cameras
the owner’s obsessed I’m certain. I could sit here all day –
you theorising the bestial realities of vampire academia,
I absorbing the music of your outrage;
Golder’s Hill Park, basking on sunny heaths of your childhood
in radiant human platonic glow 19 years unborn now led from the
wombcage into the real where you wait as vision;
Bow, where in millennia to come archaeology will finally discover
what it means to love in verse carved into ruins of what we could
at last call home after saga of wrestling London’s landlord beast factory;
Mile End, where Victorian philanthropy vomited forth colleges
now consumed in vice-chancellors’ Nosferatu mouth of greed,
where we stand at the birth of new poetic connection
About David Dobson
David is from Bradford, Yorkshire, currently living in London studying English literature at university and is a writer of poetry, prose, and whatever is in between.