The Songstress’s First Song

The Tale of the Lily-White Riotess

The songstress spies the chancellor through lavish

eyelashes across the ward and chuckles

throatily. Pensive she lifts her lyre and gently

plucks one string. And then another. Till

the Chancellor, sedated by the tinkling music,

is biddable and fit to hear her song. I sing

a tale, she strums, of anarchy and charm,

in London town, in times of old, long gone.

*

Threadneedle Street winds under the tall windows

of buildings mirroring the sky, the Thames

drooling its filth into the Serpentine, as fires

of fury cast their messages of demolition

and despair across the inner cities of the land.

Jah vents His rage against the whores of Babylon

like a volcano in flame; the flower

of Empire’s youth, hopes trashed, rise up tsunami-like

to surf the drudgery and downpression of the man,

in search of greener grass and bluer skies to drug

themselves and drag themselves up out of bed

to draw the dole. Punks, heads in bags, and ranting drunks

loll about idly in the streets between chippies

and pubs, bookies and shops purveying cut-price fags

and ale. Yours truly, your heroine, among them,

fallen, into this man-created world.

*

An ash of grief settles on Westminster, Whitehall

and No. 10. Trafalgar totters at the tapping

of her blue suede shoes; her ballet daps flatten the dome

of the millennium; postcoital smokers

aimlessly salute the sultry moon and ghosts

waltz on the rust belt that unites our ruined

kingdom. Usurpers one and all, bereft

of all belonging and worth, all migrants now,

we sing and dance and spit, and play the bass

guitar as London burns. Seek refuge from ourselves.

The gutter beckons its kith and kin. Like rainwater,

it rushes zealously down the drain. The brutal

cut of this urban fabric is way too drab

and desolate without an acid tab to take

the edge off it and smack to bed you down for night

and uppers in the light of dawn to pick you up

out of the public bog, as Venus in a fuzzy

blur rises in smoggy mourning sky and brassy

Mercury flits around the sun and Mars is on

the warpath once again. Pretty and pink and round

the bend, and down the rabbit hole, she goes into

a coma on the Lambeth walk.

*

The songstress curtsies,

tiptoes in kinky boots from London Eye

to topmost floor of Gherkin and of Shard

across the Garden Bridge, landing to free the ghosts

of those unjustly done to death by Tudor queens

and kings. Smoke in her eyes, she showers the passersby

on Tower Bridge with flowers and tears of gas and chucks

up lunch and Bloody Marys in the saline waters

of the murky estuary. By night, she tumbles

down the up-escalator at Waterloo,

as yobs in drainpipe trousers kick the living

daylights out of some passing sod who’s done no wrong

down in the tube station at midnight.

Photo by Jonathan Harrison on Unsplash