Dick stick-up Turpin’s parish, bandit dude,
no plastic, only bling and flash,
a leather wristlock grabbing cash,
a gun snouting the carotid’s
blipping quasar, he’d strip them nude
if they resisted force. On Folgate Street
the light arriving seems to stay
like time-cutting video:
are the photons full of spatial info
the same dusty ones I saw yesterday
as gold polluted dazzle, carbon haze?
Dick sniffs for J.P. Morgan, stiffs
investment bankers, wears a black eye patch
and rips them like a virtual alligator
or a Tornado GR4
nuking a shelled Libyan tank.
Dick’s the beef in Bishopsgate,
his fat cat’s cock turns gold in Blossom Street
slashing metabolised profits at a wall
hallucinating 1739
rope-burn cutting into his twisted neck
hoisted to the mobster Tyburn gallows
the crowd big as an O2 revival gig
his loot stashed away like WMD,
the thing like a psychotic episode
only it’s happening. He lopes
into the Water Poet for troubleshooters,
the black pavement grid outside rumbling streams
as the city’s diagnostic read-out
of its bacterial anthology.
His dealing room’s his killing field
spread-betting while thunder slams in
as fizzy atmospheric dialect
a black slash over Spital Square
breaking that moment into violent rain.
(from Whitehall Jackals, a work-in-progress)
