Fugazi

Vodka intimate, an affair with isolation in a Blackheath cell.
Extinguishing the fires in my private hell.
Provoking the heartache to renew the license
Of a bleeding heart poet in a fragile capsule.
Propping up the crust of the glitter conscience,
Wrapped in the christening shawl of a hangover,
Baptized in tears from the real.

Drowning in the liquid, seize on the Piccadilly line, rat-race.
Scuttling through the damp electric labyrinth.
Caress Ophelia's hand with breaststroke ambition.
The albatross courtship, maritime tradition.
Sheathed with the walkman, wear the halo of distortion,
Aural contraceptive, aborting pregnant conversation.

But she turned the harpoon and it pierced my heart;
She hung herself around my neck.

From the Time-Life guardians in their conscience bubbles,
Safe and dry in my sea of troubles.
Nine to Fives, with suitable ties,
While I`m cast adrift as their sideshow, peepshow, stereo hero.
Be calm, be still, bewitch, drowning, drowning in the real.

The thief of Baghdad hides in Islington now,
Praying deportation for his sacred cow.
A legacy of romance from a twilight world.
The dowry of a relative mystery girl.

A Vietnamese flower, a dockland union.
A mistress of release from a magazine's thighs.
This Magdalene contracts more than favours.
The feeding hands of western promise hold her by the throat.

A son of the swastika of '45, parading a peroxide standard.
Graffitti disciples conjure testaments of hatred.
Aerosol wands whisper where the searchlights trim the barbed wire hedges.
This is Brixton chess,

A knight for embankments folds his newspaper castle.
A creature of habit, begs the boatman`s coin.
He`ll fade with old soldiers in the grease-stained roll-call.
Linger with the heartburn of Good Friday`s last supper.

Son watches father scan obituary columns,
In search of absent school friends,
While his generation digests high-fibre ignorance.
Cowering behind curtains and the taped up, painted windows.
Decriminalized genocide, provided door-to-door Belsens.
Pandora`s box of holocausts.
Gracefully cruising satellite-infested heavens.
Waiting, the season of the button,
The penultimate migration.
Radioactive perfumes for the fashionably,
For the terminally insane, insane.

Do you realise, do you realise, do you realise
This world is totally fugazi?

Where are the prophets, where are the visionaries?
Where are the poets, to breach the dawn of the sentimental mercenary?