London Air as All Air

The only time Parliament left town, they
blamed the boreholes. In Joseph’s canoe,
arms were found floating next to clovers
growing out of the pestilent mudbanks.

Bazalgette begged others to consider the miasmic
as if it could become an occult. But before the king,
there was the crown’s cause beneath all
those irretrievable, counting moons.

Centuries prior, Richard Whittington wanted
to call all the mini caverns
deep in the Thames “sparkling wells.”
In his sole portrait, he wanted
to hold a skull to represent the deathly
smell surrounding his house but was convinced
by his daughter to hold a black cat, instead.

An elaborately unprecedented Byzantine
octagonal design easily quantified
what Bazalgette once said
to electromagnetist Michael Faraday
about how everyone loves a clean
face but only death changes routines.

The line of force in a field
makes an arc—like over in Birmingham,
another Joseph—Chamberlain—carved
TIME OF DEATH into his
canoe paddles. The young woman
he found spitting an abscess
through her cheek confused him
for her brother and wanted her brother
to know that she hated him.

Chamberlain died late into a night, chasing
phytoplankton that were feeding on discarded
East India company bananas as brown as
the river water. Water will never ask anything,
especially, “What are you looking for?” It loves
to look endlessly and imagine no eyelids.

Traveling back to London, it was Whittington who
stopped the carriage to walk the last 14 kilometers
as the curtains were inundated
with Thames plague oils, how the hint
of death is only rid by disappearances.

The Sewer King once met a collective
of farmers who mentioned a tyrant man
called William Cesspool who’d become
known for cutting the limbs from
those who didn’t pay him with a pitsaw
after he tied them to parallel
tree trunks. Cesspool would then be seen
paddling from the Northern Outfall to Abbey Mills,
using those limbs as oars.

After seeing an outbreak in the thin
air of winter attack those farmers before
Cesspool could get to them, Bazalgette figured
the psychotic murder of a tyrant
was better than the molasses timed face-boil
death of an unbelievable water borne illness.

Bazalgette burned charcoal incessantly at home
after he witnessed the on-sight shooting
of three hundred Berkshire and Landrace pigs
at the Stratford Langthorne land trust. The pigs’d
bathed in the Thames just before being executed.

This was also a day before The Great Stink
was donned with its name. Once, going to gather
water for a paraplegic neighbor, Bazalgette saw
not only the tone of the Thames change, but
the texture. It had thickened almost to caramelization,
and as he dipped his ceramic mug
into the river, he decided
not to fill the bucket.

Thomas Miller, a rattan weaver, watched
his hands change nearly overnight. It became
impossible to grip anything. Bazalgette paid him a visit,
exclaiming how everything seemed to be
beginning to float toward a collision
that holds the auspice of uncontrollable death,
and the incessant thought that fires are nothing
compared to water with an inhuman purpose.