These money people float
Their money makes them
So light
Their soles are not touching
Anything, they live like
Angels
No memories staring back
From the streets they pass,
The ex-
Council blocks they buy
When they come down from
Heaven.
But they never land, they
Glide an inch above real
Living
You can still hear the mortals
From time to time, they
Break out
With feet that know the old
Streets, feet that can’t float like
Angels.
(Written somewhere between Shoreditch and Hoxton)
Every step a struggle
Every word a prayer for
It to stop, every blink
Caked in cheap mascara,
Every thread of jean
Grabbing at hunger aching
In the hips and knees
Under the floating breakers
Washing round the hollows
Of her emptied heart
He used to hoard his poems in a plastic bag –
They were heavy but the burglars threw them on their
Backs with the rest of his life – fill the cracks in theirs
With more crack.
Later, he came home and found it
Gone and worse, his poems taken, and he knew that
Somewhere, soon, they would decompose in the stink
Of rotting food.
Nothing was left, he had no insurance, he had
No chip that housed anything good he’d ever said
With dread the sink dripped and he thought how stupid
He had been to put his poems in a plastic bag that felt like money.
[To be continued]
Being Every Day 