It is a living thing

It is a living thing

Moving slowly, stirring the mud

Never clear enough to see through

Slipping through dirty fingers

Sifting out treasures

Washed up brooches, bloated floaters

Fallen from grace

Pick a bridge anywhere between

Vauxhall and Westminster

Rubbish bins gather in fetid corners

Out of sight

Surrey Quays illuminates Rotherhithe

Condoms gather together, entwined like dead lovers

The Isle of Dogs is a misnomer

On the edge of madness

Stuck right out into the inky flood

As old Father Thames

Rolls up its sleeves for a dust-up

Between a floating restaurant

Moored next to a Gin Palace

And a Russian Oligarch

Well oiled at midnight

Making his way to a haven

From the masses,

The working classes

Who once were the proletariat

Looking to end his hegemony

Barring his way to the superyacht club

That once was a warehouse for

The East India company

Back in Empire days

When the river was a gutter

And all who lived beside it were

Just water rats

Feral scavangers, living off the detetrus

Of the populace

Nothing much has changed

But the ambient lighting

Stretched across the Tate Modern

When the truth is left to mudlarks

Basking on a sandbank at low tide

Ferris wheels

And firework displays

Are window dressing on a grand scale

As the purposively winding river wraps itself

In the tattered remains of heritage

Squeezing the very last drops of humanity

Into a London Gin bottle

And watching as it floats

On the tumbledown

All the way from Tower Bridge

Into a heaving, salt-soaked

Unrelenting sea.