The war memorial’s slashed in brash Cyrillic-esque graffiti:
“Da Shapka Krew runs tings” and slits your whistle-throat entreaty
for peace in a pebbledashed circus where defaced, de-souled banditti
give a blindfold knife-thrower sort of show
down South-Central Walthamstow.
Innocence treads tightropes over crack-fiend, thief and lurker
and Romance is a concrete-booted rubber-gloved mazurka.
The only feeling in your gut’s the chunks of chicken burger
juggled by your gastric flow
down South-Central Walthamstow.
Boys in bubbled price-tagged trainers peacock out of shops
that sink their fangs in necks in lands where workers’ rights are swapped
for football shirts, down alleyways to burp on alcopops.
They burn copies of ‘No Logo’
down South-Central Walthamstow.
Pearly Kings were decapitated or abdicated instead,
the double-barrels rolled out and the chirpy sparras fled.
Now landlords, slippery as eels, are stroking the queen’s head,
those bleeding Berkshire hunts who go
and buy South-Central Walthamstow.
With Cockney character kicked carefully in each squinting eyeball,
the atmosphere’s convenient, the situation viable
for a bunch of patisserie-posies to outprice their native rival
and toast the ghostly post-mortem show
that is South-Central Walthamstow.
Beaujolais-bathed hyacinths burst upwards every day
even though “There’s a distinct lack of café societé!”
and now it costs the firefighters’ union’s yearly pay
for a shack on a shark-infested row
down South-Central Walthamstow.
The wine-bars on the murder mile charge for piles of ice,
a vegan restaurant flowers where the butcher’s boy got sliced,
on every corner slumps a beggar in a coat of lice
where clumps of dandelions grow,
down South-Central Walthamstow.
