Remember the useful endeavour of Joseph Williamson,
The mole of Mason Street,
Who constructed surprises beyond the apsiring of man
Beneath his feet,
Whose element was the Underworld, whose Plutonic
Shade is the sand-
Stone forest of deep-down disremembered darkness
Felled by his hand,
Or umber and ochre meadow reaped for the aid
Of supervised labour,
His underfed Irish: tread softly on Joseph's ghost,
Your downstairs neighbour,

Whose thought was sound
When in-side out and upside-down he fashioned
His burial mound.

Who wandered down from Warrington in at the age of eleven
In 1781,
Was lord of his own strange, dripping and literal suburb
Before he was done,
Who, youngest apprentice of Thimas Moss Tate,
Esquire,
Tobacco Importer,
Twenty years later had eaten the family business
And married its daughter
To come in exceptional wealth to an odd retirement,
His cellar floor,
Wherunder he started to dig up that darkness whereby
He spread some more,
For who can explain
The excavation of nothing whatever for neither
Light nor gain?

In wombs and catacombs below
The air: in brownish-purple tombs

Of sombre echo where no moon
Illimined him among the bare

Wet-whispered caverns, dreamed-out rooms:
The waif of Warrington, I do

Believe, looked for his mother there.

Seventeen stations to Seaforth Sands,
their names a sort of History Quiz,
a mark for every one you knew:
Nelson, Clarence, Huskisson, Gladstone.
Journey's end, the Caradoc bar
and a congress of whores from Regent Road.
The Overhead drip-fed gutter-hungry
sailors, urgent to let the salt sea
out of their system for a night,
from ship to bar, from bar to bed,
and if their luck was in to ship again.
(If not, the lock-up, or a split head
and empty wallet down some dark ginnel.)

Six miles it stuttered and clattered over
bowstring bridges in which the gale sang.
To port, the river and a half a hundred docks,
With piers, jetties, cranes, gantries,
and the lonely wail of sirens in sulphurous fog.
To starboard, empty warehouses,
as big as pyramids; halftime mills;
mansions built from profit in slaves,
let out in rooms to lascar greasers,
firemen from Lados and Accra:
bed, chair, no oilcloth on the floor,
two bob a week. The fleas came free.

Meccano-construct of some mad engineer,
less magic carpet, more aerial tram,
it served as butt for adenoidal jokes
by those Murphys and Quinns who scuffed its boards
in hobnailed boots, settled ample backsides
on varnished slats, spat on its floor,
were hidden in acrid smokescreens
laid down by their gnarled and spittled clays,
and at the drop of a hat wore the Green
to burnish stories of old hungers, rapes,
massacres and half-forgotten wrongs.

Had its uses by darkness, too.
Under its watertight umbrella,
lost souls slept in sacks, dreamt of jobs,
of food, and fire and fields of lavender.