I dreamt your red hair/ falling into your handbag

I dreamt your red hair
falling into your handbag, searching for a key
to a bar, a shopfront,
no, the back door to your tenement; 
open collar, and coat,
a wide square, with all these little gardens;
*
radiance of/ warehouse music and/ happy crowds
behind the music, murmuring/
*
this is why I can't leave London. Zac Goldsmith
has this mansion in Petersham, round the corner
to my father's birthplace, on the estate, the Sandpits;
Goldsmith said he'd demolish
London's remaining social housing. I can't leave these memories
unkept in the winds, the meadows,
*
because of David Bowie, and my ancestors
with him in Stockwell.
My family came centuries ago, from Norwich,
Will made shoes and Margaret
made dresses, he came to work the railway
and his son did, and his son, but unemployment
was a plague, returning; a choice by government, cheap workers;
labouring, playing pub pianos,
married Liz at twenty; she swept the Oxo factory
and in the docks of London
he spoke many languages, with sailors.
He died in his forties, of poisoning.
*
My fatherless grandad/ they walked Stockwell shoeless/
he finally got a council house, married my grandma
who'd walked out of the mansion, disgusted at the idea
of spending her life in service;
*
bled out by the bankers
and overlords in Petershams, I will return by train
on iron horse through marshland; travel-flash in estuary,
night-trips up slim rivers, on speeding hallways railed
on Sussex breakwaters; I will return there wageless
passing down names,
*
I will bring back flame
to where my kind burn candles
in the attics of craftspeople's districts;
or ironworks, or music-halls, buildings of iron and glass
which our labour keeps transparent; by the flooding river
my grandad canvassing Battersea
you steal from us and impoverish,
we came here with John Ball, circa 1380
and are still here, camped, and waiting