A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Ontario?
(A Poem in the Tongue of the Thames)

In the soot‑strewn back alleys of a Coventry‑grade future,
where the road‑signs blink in a neutral‑colour glare,
a lanky lad strides—blue‑milk-faced, his boot tucked with a lorry‑hope,
and every beat of his heart
rhythms to the metal‑to‑delirium drum.

He spins the vases of his childhood,
flashing “H‑O Rocket” through the fog‑drenched lanes,
his tin‑pocket dreams all dyed in the brilliance of a stolen anti‑tubercular memoir.
The city, a park‑land of neon, is his playground;
every corner a shrine to the crimson‑shielded past.

And then, oh, the word!
The Ludovico.
The doctor’s iron‑clad hand, the kinesiology of guilt;
he watches the boy’ s pupils –
the warm‑dots dissolving “vampy” colour,
the blood‑scented memory bleeding into an achingly dull onslaught of epistemology.

Yet still the youth remembers the orange’s rind,
the sweet‑devoured memory of its prismatic scent.
He gazes out to the brimming skyline, the mushrooming lattice/gear,
knows the clockwork is an automatism, but still he holds on to the soulful rhythm of that violent, unapproved London noise.

So, a Testament of the Clockwork,
an ode to that which is neither black nor white,
neither a bot nor a bloke – a delirious tin‑thread soul that still sings the urban jam in the absence of the great waves of the past.