London’s burning;
Behold the century, slowly melting
Behind closed curtains.
Like billow-black smoke

The anguish bulges
Screams punch the furnace;
Fingertips and knuckled fists,
Curled by atrophy.

Just political debris. Ingested, buried.

Wretched, baneful,
Cancerous. The outgrowth:
Gainsay, up-againstness,
Dissent. Human root-scourge.

Anchored vagrantly,
In the bitter opened ground.
Mrs May. Go and splice the heaving tumour
With an official spade.

Puckering under the weight
Of shame-spillage, the hour
Moans and collapses.
Spectators crowd her. Crack.

Mother stag. Black as boots.
Scalpel shining. Legs flailing,
Tendril-splayed underfoot.
Newborn babes

Capsized and crow-gutted.
Blind, witless, blinking.
Grief-straining at your throat.
Swallow stiffly.

Pained with belly-bloat,
Grendel- villain- reawakens. Shitting
On the inviolable: human souls.
Ashes to offal. Slabber-strewn

With self-admiration,
At the burning ordure. Grenfell tower,
Hissing with necrosis-
Like igneous pan-juices.

Behind her hollow, hundred-eyes
Sleep charred remains. Unhatched forever.
Pillar of aborted dismay.
A concrete, slab-cold wildflower:

Decimated, deformed, devoured.

High-rise block turned truth-tomb
Of sorrow; skinned by fire.
Now abandoned. Now bone-cave.
Now funeral pyre.

Or suicidal mother,
Pollen-wreathed by madness
In a garden of roses. A muttering,
Sullied enigma.

No matter.

In manicured lawns, the grass still glistens
with mirthless laughter;
Jewelled with soft sun-blood
Luxuriating on your shoulder-blades

While noble Grenfell stands by;
Another time-piece of empire-
Ossified. Moored in vapour waves,
and gas-rubble.

Haunting those few
Who have mind-slung
Coal on the blazing altar.
For we- us- shall never forget

The skin-embers:
Grey relics of soft-tissue,
Memory, loss, and hope.
Casting out in the world

Like a revenant ghost.