Wandering around Zadie Smith’s Kilburn
London entwined in congealed race
White sex scumbags
Hobbly old aunts
Young men who had kids too early
Carrying tricycles under their arms

A parade to Gerry’s Pompeii
A garden on the Paddington canal
filled with makeshift statues of British historical figures
Made by Gerry Dalton
– now a craze in the art world
A carnival of colour and absurdity in the autumn rain

Council houses counting their durability
Clones with old house plants
Doors counting rhythms of concrete stairwells
Gen Z shouts: “Peckham is brutifal!”

I saw the best minds of my generation
Writing adverts for tech products
Upgrading their job titles from account executive to account manager
For Deloitte and KPMG

Dress-wearing men parade the streets of New Cross
Dallying Cautiously
Kilt wearing schoolgirls in Highgate

Protestors curl around Whitehall
While metropolitan police arrest blind pensioners
A counter protest of Zionists and nationalists nearby
Light and darkness mingled

The engine of capital roars in its Isengard dungeon (Canary Wharf)
Across the river artists sell paintings for tenners in their Woolwich studios

Lloyds bankers meditate in thee Buddhist centre, seeking New Age ablution

In St Thomas’s hospital, people on their last legs with cathatas
Zimmer frame through pale green wards

Phones ping between here and Waterloo
A thousand pings a minute

Yet it is quiet and grounding in Rose’s abode
As grounded as Silapriya’s sentences
And the presence of my Triratna Buddhist mentors
A bulwark of calm in the face of jumpy feeling

Richard Roger’s taste for deconstructions
Contrasts with Belgravia’s lucid white columns

Coins no longer rain into the guitar cases of buskers
Only the tappings of phone wallets
The faces of bus drivers nod in a depressed stupor
As acknowledged by their passengers: “thank you driver!”
Is happiness a skill?
Is it given to some and not to others by an unearthly god?

All is tragic, all is victorious,
From Harrod’s to Tower Hamlets

Dickens still walks these streets
Was John Soames happy in his Hogarthian labyrinth?

Women rub shoulders with seasoned football supporters
Before an Arsenal ladies match

While men spend their entire monthly salary
On a Tottenham Hotspur season ticket
This is how men discharge their warring tendencies
Without wrestling free of neoliberal choke hold
Nor breaking through the veneer of superficiality in any way

“We build our computer (systems) the way
we build our cities:
over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” – Ellen Ullman

I used to think that there was a directionality to Leviathan
But there is none.
Technological evolution happens of itself
An out of control algorithm
Grey ecosystems wearing trainers and tracksuits
Sam Altman says it took him being the “adult in the room”
To realize the adults in the room do not know what they’re doing

Free market capitalism misses the point
Our sacred life is split into numbered hours
Of pointless production

How can one person change anything?
All I can do is write down what I see happening
Seek solidarity with those willing to resist
Take to the streets

Philosophers toke weed through the night
Which rolls into some untrodden dawn