Nothing survives but
institution
stretching
its long skeletal arms
along the South Bank:
a metaphoric
Fort Bragg for the pseudo-
cultivates still getting drunk
on empire, sexing it up
with Austen in west country drag
__________
I’ll have to play
the Dadaist to your damnation, even
damning myself if I get pulled too close
to the gravity well of peerage,
writing against its clique
from the wilderness;
surrendering to steam
rojectiles flung as bows and arrows
against a hard toffee centre
that selects its society,
then padlocks
the canon as a cathedral
we all should kneel
in the mind
It asks something of the spirit
of ’77, the year Rotten was clean,
to write as a loaded gun
recognise past as bonfire
so adventure can stretch
in stead, contented as an eye
that burns its experiment
on the blank pages
of an aristocracy still-
born on the pirate’s plank