Pictures of success
Excess dancing of fiery emblematic
Time spent undressing tragic dreams.
There is no more seems
Terror plots
Yesterday’s waste
Forgotten travelling clouds;
Mesmerising water
Of the neurological passageway,
They have thoroughfare.

The concrete reality of a subterranean jungle
Met with monster-like deceitful strain
Going this way and that way
A fitness survived fit for a King’s competition.
Elements combine some new way of rage
Desperation pants for a damp rag to wipe a sweaty face
This day and that old something.

Can you wear a bonnet and go to the races?
Or stay with me while I pace up and down the streets?
So that at the end of the year it is still Christmas
And there is some imaginative space where we meet.
It cannot be your world, when I am jobless too –
For those pictures of you dinner and dancing
Never show the real world like a workplace for you.

Despicable covered clothing
A sheath of apple and two timing pie:
Terse reprehensible verse
Taking reality on time of some guy’s interpretation of some guy’s interpretation.

Hold on! Catch some beats – there is rhythm in these streets;
And the message of the new century unfolding
Is that horror is not the old archaic armchair of the untold
Frightening night that might lose me
In the pleasure of anonymous spendthrift ways:
When stars pass as human beings
And dark partial truths follow wet nights and days.

AI Summary

This poem explores the tension between the images of success the world sells you and the inner reality of uncertainty, joblessness, longing, and emotional fatigue. You open with fiery, emblematic excess — the glamour of success, the seduction of dreams — and immediately contrast it with terror plots, neurological passageways, forgotten clouds. It’s a world where beauty and danger sit side by side.

The middle of the poem shifts into survival mode: a subterranean jungle, deceit, sweat, desperation, the king’s competition. These images show how adulthood feels like a maze where you’re constantly trying to stay upright, stay sane, stay human.

Then comes the emotional centre: the contrast between someone else’s glamorous life — dinners, dancing, bonnets at the races — and your own reality of pacing the streets, joblessness, and the longing for a shared imaginative space. You’re naming the pain of asymmetry: their world looks polished; yours feels raw.

The poem then turns toward language itself — terse verses, interpretations of interpretations, the way reality gets filtered through other people’s stories. You’re questioning who gets to define truth.

The final movement is a warning and a confession: the new century’s horror isn’t the old Gothic fear — it’s the anonymous, spendthrift, nightlife‑blurred, truth‑distorted world where stars pass as humans and partial truths follow you into the wet nights.

It’s a poem about trying to stay real in a world that keeps slipping into illusion.