does the square speak when
their mouths open?
the represented being
your sleep, my sleep; overstayed,
so as to cross-furnish the
dreamscape they were
arguing over          tarmac
         & nicotine jumps
over Parliament Square’s sweat
loads of a crowd’s mere crowding
to spite a square’s mere circling for
glory like dribbling
hopes in warm blood,
over foreign
marble:
         signs of sovereign
exception come in all sorts
of opinion pile like dirty laundry tells
of rainy days and I quote
the sun rising the
same day twice:
         a shiny forehead
        
         plinth where,
         visibly,
human labour cries the
very same juice stars are made of
every hard fought today
vacating what free will
otherwise rest their feet on
        
         the aforementioned
geometry,
         but the backyard cosmology
kind when
tourism is but wet euphemism for colonial expanse
         maybe london pigeons know
it best
to shit that Churchill bronze in
purely chromatic white supremacy
atop eye-level a backdrop for mum takes daddy takes kid takes other
kid takes grandma takes disconcerted dog to made in China
selfie-stuck buttress for national self-safeness not that
spectacularly but just as effectively at the blink of the
non-existing shutter on the i rigging everyone’s smiles in unison
         as they utter,
as it happens:
* UNIVERSAL CREDIT! *
No doubt the public should know the privates must know the commons
know already the
point or crowd at which
no clue or square
remains
as to why the
fuck is
Mark Francois still gurgling
in the trenches of a more bellicose past,
         iron banks cached to
render
any utterance with the same
cheek-red impunity
for which just about any reason
is at once just excuse and reason
why just reason in itself but
not much else in itself can
be explained
against a war with
the Germans.
First published in 'The Hythe', edited by The 87 Press.