Urbania

I. Babylon
Mighty, mighty schizo city
You of disinherited forepersons
Where stalk-walked we,
Sundered, purred, questioned
Faithlessness, wrote far too
Many replies, wondered -
Bare-beckoned you us to
Choice of vacillating side, denied,

Tar and feather streets
Seemed to point-blank back
To spaces whereupon
Tried dry I, failed utterly to hide
From who you sit,
Queenhasbeen, royal eyes slit
Rose-bled, twitching, violent,
Benevolent violet neon against redding sky -

Took me you as beloved
Wedded clown, pied lyre paying
Round stonewalls elected
Round this body politick,
Yet kept myself I from heart of
You lain bitch-black,
Fat-catted, baptized in shock
Of every monsoonal drain.

II. Volta
Made I igniting alchemical,
No ingots got from being lead, instead
Dead from irradiation,
Verily plural, E Pluribus Plumbum,
Terrible splendour of slums upon slums -
Sprawling, spent
Remnants spread on fallow fields -

Took I this plastic trash of
Your interminable cleanliness,
Turned it into pleasure qua
Pleasure indescribable, prosthetic.
Play with words an unforgivable
Lack, pen is cast straight out of
Page – out the polysemy,
Out the aesthetic, this is the

Oxford English, quite
Rice-white; out the asyndeton,
Is taking short cut, unbecoming;
Out anagnorisis, ignoramus,
Quaint, dusty, must fail thusly,
Deleterious and deletable and
Indelicate and desirable.

III. Fallen Is Babylon
Here then these lines, mine,
Rhyme-hymn of offering, song swung
To farthest whim, verse flown freer,
Scraping sky more truer than
All your glass and aluminum can,
Voice boiling, soil calling all
Yearning for glimpse of palimpsests
Inkling beneath the wet wormwork
Yours this perforated underground -

Hear them gun-thunder, slur sure,
Absurd, abjured foretaste for
Golden future still stuck,
Shell-shocked in yellowing sunrises,
Your now-mellow irises comprising
A-million camera lenses to conjure
With, your faces erasing with
Image the abject subject man -

Us make these streets for conversing,
For lovers, for cursing
Hopelessness at dawning
Daylight, saving time for
When stopped clocks need starting,
The injured starling nursed
And trusted to vagaries;
A thrice-missed, rain-kissed morning.