Caledonian Road daydream remembrance

I should really be writing some new poems, but I need a new, perhaps more prosy, style, and I haven't found it yet. This one, which I wrote about ten years ago, I've copied out of my notebook—with some difficulty, since my handwriting is so bad—reconstructing it as best I could according to the spirit of those days, and leaving unchanged its slightly idiosyncratic punctuation.
If I remember rightly, I had a thing about Shakespeare, blank verse and "the line as a unit of measurement" back then—all of which seems a bit quaint to me now. Nor would I be so tempted to use the device of the "fictional I" anymore, I think.

A warm wind tickling my features
as I rose on the escalator staircase,
I closed my eyes like a child enjoying affection,
at home in the moment for once,
emerging from the depths of a dark mood
as I emerged from the underground.
The ticket machines I leapt, no problem;
all inward insuperable cowardices I also cleared
easily, or mentally belted like Super Mario
so that they shattered to fragile shark teeth
briefly, before exiting harmlessly the screen.

Rain fell in the swallowing gutters
as I leaned on the Piccadilly railings to see
the numerous, hatted office workers scuttling
in mackintoshes through the slanting rain,
refreshing lights of the Carlsberg billboard
fill and empty, green beams of the lettering
igniting the drizzle into little green flecks of flame;
the wrinkles in the yellowed rainwater
that trickled in the guttering completely absorbed me
so that my mind swam like a curious fish
through the white ruins of a crinkled moon.

What would it matter, said my free-wheeling
brain, if I woke on a blustery night that's dark
to find a new flood rapping at my door?
An elegant lady angel, I had the feeling,
would be dispatched to the disaster scene
with nails and toolkit to knock up an ark
and, gathering clean and unclean thoughts
in pairs, she and I would sail safely
over the submerged pubs and clubs of Soho—
taking time out, maybe, for a relaxing cruise
until the worst of it had blown over.

(1998)