POEM BY ANDREW NIGHTINGALE

Coming into Canary Wharf on the DLR

Rather than being formal to the point of violence:
fucked up by its mantic honeymoon with dead water,

the rectilinear slurry graves and their brightly coloured boats.
Something homely in the smeared dusk: the yellow lights,

the slackened compulsion after six that eases
the slant rhyme of smart casual, the violence of crowds

cleverly dissipated by clever architectural design.
The sense of companionship it leaves is wrong,

as if a body, disinterred, were found wearing a novelty tie.
Curving in, over cold grey panels of meniscus,

the cathedral's candlelight and murmur is nodal,
wedding the purity of financial violence to chic cellular

home lives, echoes of the yellow light, mortgaged
mash-ups in hinterlands of children and pets.

An empty barge, bloated like a corpse: a lost soul, laid up,
going nowhere, floating where the taped voices miss,

the daylight bulbs are blind and there's no screen, no login,
only the formalities that follow self-harm,
cubes of stopped river bedding the dead bride’s dream.

Andrew Nightingale nightand@yahoo.co.uk
317c Richmond Road, Twickenham, TW1 2PB