Lines written a wobbling bridge

London happens out of the corner of your eye

Between the tourist sights – in the alleys and the waste places.

In the crack of the great imperial parade grounds, it pushes up like the mustard seed of the proverbs. Its intentions are insidious and indefatigable, a plan to live that is deeper than the architects can excavate, a root that cracks the layers of polite stucco and concrete.

The unnamed thing between the Old St Paul’s and the new,

Not the past red bus, or the new red bus, but redness itself

(the pop and fizz of it, like a bomb).

It is the soul of poetry over rote; disturbing, coarse, raw, vital.

London, fata morgana, kami of the reed sea that borders the Thames,

If Paris is the incarnate pleasures of the vie bohème

London is the far off, the in between,

The grey dawn before your test of glory, or demise.

Like the limitless names of Mary, to the glass-eyed acolyte, it is:

The call to turn again at Highgate,

The promise of the bargain from Portobello market,

The destination we dream of when we try on our best,

The next tide of the Thames, to the merchant adventurer,

The reflection in the still water for the resting painter,

The one in a million face in the multitude to the recently bereaved,

The waft of buttered rice from the open window and the strains of Saadi to the refugee.

It is the hill (shunning the call of the dog by the fire in the cottage by the sea)

we come to die on.