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.