Daniel Payet

City Lights

Come follow me, as I navigate the congested metropolitan maze
I follow its web of luminescent asphalt under Thatcher’s watch
For beacons I take the legacies of Wren and that of Hawksmoor
Look out for the bishop of domes, fat as an overblown balloon
Look out for his two leaner attendants, as they swing from west to east
When the train makes a cross over Blackfriars on its trail northwards
Like spires I do battle with the grey leaden shutters above my head
Lest its weight corrodes the force of my battery with rust and rot
Within the canyons of her indifferent edifices, I have come to search
Like the shifting and restless crowd I shoulder the heavy mantle
And watch ghosts raised on plinths fight those becoming ghosts
Here, an army of accountant blessed the marriages of steel and glass
Layers of sedimented talents rest in muted tensions with the conceptual
And affluence cared for by labour imported in steamers and in lorries.

Tonight she's dressed as every other night
In gold lame cut low and a brazen smile
In a brace of fake pearls and torn grey tights
The muddy and languid Thames is her mirror
My loathing for her is equalled only by my love for her

Supine she laid herself out in undulating folds
She may be down but she has not lost her grandeur
She presents herself with two Palaces, one at each end
There’s the non existent Crystal and the shabby Alexandra
I joined the countless suitors in her dark crevices
And I coveted her wares arrayed behind glass
I weighed my burnished coins, which grades eminence
I was found wanting and the crowd ignored my curses
‘’This latter day Rome sucks the life out of all of you
She squeezes talent out like toothpaste out of a tube
And then she discard the shell on her ‘has been’ tip’’
A drunken tramp in his shelter of cardboard, laughed
And laughed, full in my face, until a dry cough took over.

“Yo! Dis is Ebony FM on your airwaves
Dropping kriss tunes from the ghett’o
Telling it like it’ is – so don’t touch that dial
Crackle, crackle shhhhhhhhhh!

There is a clash in the airwaves round here
It corrodes my borrowed and mannered verse
The rhythm is intense, delivered in booming
Staccato, as the Westway drops into the Bush
Harsh wind whistles through the void of my flat
Piled vertiginously high, pitching fragile hopes
Against the force of wired steel pylons
Against an empty can blown across the parking lot.

The wind in nostalgic notes
Sings out of the cornet of the Duke
Discoloured leaves shuffle across the asphalt
In a desperate ‘danse macabre’
To amuse the shoppers along the circus
Addicted to the promenade of Oxford Street
Only to mock the modesty of two old ladies
Loitering amongst the ceaseless throng
Before expiring in a long and wistful sigh

On the bridge that would feign unite one river bank to the other
A casual emission flowed devoid of passion and tenderness
I turned again to the lament of silted mud and discarded love

I came upon your corpse left high by the receding sludge
At first I swore that this was not you and pleaded to be left alone
To let my gut empty itself of its breakfast of milk and cardboard
This blue thing bloated and scratched by the claws of the river
Wore your gold medallion around its neck but I knew it wasn’t you
A siren rose and fell above the murmur of departing ghosts
A police launch beached upon the gravel of no-mans land
A body bag caught the faded spark of the morning
Another spawn, has once again been cannibalised.

                        Tensions receded in waves
            The unwieldy cocoon of awareness evaporated
                                    The elixir was top notch
                        Butterflies and crazed zombies
                                    Dived into corridors of light
                        Insistent ripples spun by acoustic giants
            A space with no identifiable reference

            You shimmied, you gyrated, you the man
            How! Oh How! Did the river find you?

On the cold pavement slab
A puddle of blood is enough to drown
I do not want to know the way to hell
I do not want to know the way to Eltham
I do not know where this hate springs from
I stare and stare at the blinking screen
I do not know why all this concrete
But I do know that I bear the mark of hate

    In the shadows of the palace of ‘dedmancrazy’
Where the bells of the clock marked Greenwich Mean Time
   Mother Africa opened her legs in her fifth year in exile
             She placed an exotic flower on alien soil
                 She baptised him Solomon
                    Far from the baobabs
                        Far from the sun
                          With no drums
                           No wise men
                             No star

Solomon fought the cross winds of the tower blocks
Solomon was a reluctant star in unscripted dramas
Policemen and busybodies watched out for him
The CCTV screen was the genre which sought him out
And ‘Coppers and a Corpse’ was his last major film.

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Biography

Daniel Payet is studying on the MA Creative and Life Writing. To date he has published no work. He studied law at the University of London and he now works as a Generalist Advice Manager at the Terrence Higgins Trust. He lives in Thames Ditton in Surrey.

danielpayet@gmail.com