Walking In The District (Cont.)

What comfort is this?! This sprawling tangle of grass and weed and broken brick and glass This trigger for place and identity This obvious amiss This extinct bliss This mire of melancholy This evoking of yesterday, yesterway, yesterwhy and all that round this wound mass What comfort is this? To walk where once there was an already well-worn walk and hear again those who'd never again here call and talk And sing into the breeze along with the echoes of songs never again here sung post the abandonment and broken strings everywhere flung And brush past and imagine the hustle and bustle, the living and striving and unique way of surviving And feel part of a line once here thwarted by policy and politik, marred with malevolence, no ambivalence and hoisted on the short end of the stick What comfort is this! This knowing, where absence is the showing, this part of something inside and around me growing, this understanding, that part of the demanding is the flowing again of what was aborted - the symptoms of its lack exhorted! - yet the value of it must be extorted and the spark from the stark, the light barely visible in the dark, presumably, that there is no 'other' needs co-opting but much already manifest that is worth adopting and that most for you and me is about again making the spirit of it tangible be, and in aspiration always that it be so for everybody This comfort SP 30.09.20