as if in some listless Mediterranean
of pay-day loans and fried chicken
bruised concrete, a pale yellow sun.
Trafalgar Street leads to the Old Kent Road
where each pub could have been Henry Cooper's gym.
You can almost smell his aftershave
‘splash it on all over’, they called him.
Through the frosted glass of The Lord Nelson
like a sallow ghost, see the faded potman
his fingers twitch for a cork-tipped Rothmans
he is shadow boxing with Charlie Chaplin.
The pub seems trapped in an eternal night.
No-one would enter; not even in daylight.
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