Villon Surfacing Poem by John a'Beckett

Turbulent times tossed you around, deracine, indicted, unfitted
for the status quo, re-fashioned, as fate washed you into oceanic shape
of rambling drifter, in and out of jail, convicted and acquitted.

Here in a frozen city crowd, post-Christendom our host, still on
the brink of a millennium, stunned, stumbling through chill of change,
Hardly holier than you; the simple word for us, a ghost, Villon

lost vagabond, these later times than yours now pen the letter sent:
five hundred of those snows of yesteryear gone by, and now we'll be
condemned if things have really turned out for our betterment

Black snow mounts up; I see you down on all fours, “dying
of a thirst” gone verbal at our fountain’s cutting edge of Information,
dodging market forces, up to your old tricks again and trying

to cut your verse against the grain, the raw reality of real estate
In which we’ve shed our souls for “selves” our personality inflation
Bursts in a Pop explosion, obsolescence of our use-by-date

Note you avoid the queues, told to leave trains at the border-station
passport unstamped, identity negated, birth time and place and then
arrested for treating public transport as a bolder form of inspiration.