I’ve lived a life here in the city -
always on the brink of some revelation
or other. Steadfastly pacing to the bus,
the theatre, the library, the gallery
as if I knew something -
some obvious but invisible reason for it all.

And I’m not alone behind this mask
of intention: only the tourists bunched
nebulously about the sidewalks
(and rendering them impassable)
stare about them with a visible stupor;
confronting the consensus abyss.

It’s true. I have to concede now
the whole cavalcade is totally
incomprehensible to me;
just as I admit that I have never lived
my life in the City. On the contrary,
it is the City that has lived

some inconsequential fragment
of its life through mine.
Its needs, its sordid agendas,
its imperatives have wound
and rewound the mainspring of this
tick-tock, citizen-chronometer!

And on October mornings like these,
with the wind hacking round the corner
of Centrepoint like Masefield’s
‘whetted knife’, it’s clear the armadas
of ketches, barques and catamarans
are too otherwise intent to invest one tenth

of a piastre toward the possibility
of escape. In the Pizza Palace there,
sits one who attacks, with somewhat
overstated rapacity, his bleached-white disc
of dough smeared with vegetarian cheese -
while over there an olive-skinned couple

wrestle their king-sized mattress
onto the roof of their economy saloon.
Do they not see that reading even
the immediate road ahead is going to be
intermittently impossible
as their sagging mattress oscillates?

But wait! Only moments before there was
the chill flash of exposure. Somewhere
between that dull-red disc and the Slumberland
I have been lulled to sleep. I must set
my alarm-clock purpose anew:
lest I forget the blind man’s wakening to

exclaim ‘I see all men walking as trees!’
Why should I resign to half-life in the City:
ever at revelations´ brink; steadfastly pacing
from the unknown past to the not known
present as if I knew I knew nothing
with yet no trace of any reason for it all?

Soho, London. 1990.