Blah Blah Black Sheep

Canary Wharf

Miserable fish in an urban landscape.
Dead pigeon nestled beneath a new fire escape.
Heron adrift on a raft in Blackwall Basin.
HSBC is Babelesque as Barclays adjacent.

The maps round these parts are topsy-turvy,
Though angled exactly on Ordnance Survey.
The clean streets speak of an enforced civility,
Where safety is everybody's responsibility.

Squint your focus beyond the motorway:
There's a ragged island ungrassed with underlay
Whose suave, suffocating craftsmanship speaks to me
Of an almost unforgivably Ballardian glee.

These are pixel-perfect bricks expanded
To superhuman-sized tetris; underhanded,
The architect, an alien, received his brief
From an exiled megalomaniac, stricken with grief

For a world that turned its back on his dream,
That laughed off his every controversialist scheme.
He's left his mark mind you: this concrete oasis;
He's etched his wretchedness in each of a thousand faces.

The heat and light are solar-powered now,
Sun feeds, rain waters the uniform flowers now.
If we ask, the urge to answer is minimal,
How, in this landscape, we came to feel more like animals.