Smoky City

I couldn't help but think about it It struck me how it might not always be wise to make sense But rather to just be mindful of the process And now you're twenty-something It's all down there By the elderly Thames Where the crimson crane lights perforate the murky surface And man was stepping through the smoky city And we, walked Along the 'cycle super-highway' And wound up, wounded In Stockwell, 1998 French birds on the N109 Under the weather but inside the feeling Candlelight cast dappled reflections up the bowing walls With a hundred year old horse-hair suspended in the void And stretched across the blue evening as if in the pocket of some impossible dream I couldn't quite trust it Them vast shadows of moody buildings behind post-boxes and phone shops Always gripped me Almost in surprise And we seldom reached The East-End farrago I mean, save for the shows Birthdays and The Oslo And the soft hissing of pool table lawns All scheming amongst the proud purveyors of your finest Turkish beer Exclusively, and strictly so Safe, beneath sleeping Dalston All blurred faces in the endless shuffle The pigeons on your little Gothic church spires And well Everything had started to feel like I had been dishonest with myself, my entire life And I wasn't sure if I'd ever work out why That Nostalgic Pang The squabbles at the bus stop The pallets and the plywood Rainbow bridge and the Babbling Brook Getting mugged at the roller disco and Breaking into the Bank of England South West Two And how you act so dark In Max Roach park But I still miss you