Unreal City

Pikachu's open-O of shock, gasping
at the turge of the Themes: splattering
rain still coming down, and she’s still taking
pictures of the lewdest things, leering
out over South Bank (deserted) with a lens holding
the summer for one more day.
April is the cruellest month? Hardly.
Summer ate each bloom and blade
of grass in the commons until they yellowed to savannah,
no safari would stalk through that underbrush – too many spliffs
for zebras to pluck up with their hooves and smoke,
too many Londoners splayed-out drunk and sun-carped.
Now it’s the soft relief of late autumn. Back in Norwood, where she's from,
girls and boys run out from twacky blast gates, school’s
out, little adults in their little blazers. A fiddly man sweeps the leaves
to crevices, squeezes each breath to fug the rancid air.
A bundled Deliveroo driver putters to a curb,
demoralised, and pulls his phone to call for directions.
(The typist, now an Account Executive,
has no need for tins when food's a tap away.)
Most prepare their downy sacks for sleep,
A winter, if only we could stay in bed at work, if only we
Could order life online and deliver it to brains in jars.
Avoid the rain. Rejoice the sun.
Yet there she is, out there, no photoshopping, the rain,
The winter sputtering in,
sweet Themes, run softly til I end my song, finessing
one more shot of the sunlit skyline.

linky loo

lonky lunk

This is very much a draft and I'm very open to pulling the wires out of this one by the handful, so feel free to offer large-scale suggestions.