This week's poem, City Boy, is by Peter Daniels and appears in his recently published first collection, Counting Eggs (Mulfran Press, 2012). Daniels' poems are good at noticing the unfamiliar, or highlighting the familiar from an unexpected angle. Here, the faintly spivvy young financier, "comfortable and sharp in a suit that fits him," might have been an easy target, the tumble he takes as he "steers" homewards after closing time a cause of vengeful glee should the poet have chosen to play the anarchist or the virtuous taxpayer. But the poem has no interest in blame games. Any irony belongs primarily to the term "city boy" itself. Both the character and what he represents in a contemporary or recent London context are treated gently. The tone is occasionally amused but never judgmental.

The poem's first line suggests its speaker might have been predisposed to kindliness: "In a moment of love I caught a sense of money …" That "moment of love" could be coincidental, part of another story altogether. However, the overall mood suggests otherwise: the love is provoked by the city boy, an imaginative response to his moment of humiliation. Money's human dimension, its connection with our more vulnerable selves, is the thought associated with this "love", and it winds persistently through the poem. Meanwhile, the sentence continues, first rather gingerly holding money at a distance ("how they make it") and then bringing it into the sphere of the human with the unexpected "and make it up". This last thought may be the cornerstone of the poem. Money is like a story or a face; it is fluid and constructed – something we create.

The narrative shifts to the present tense, and what writing gurus call "the inciting incident": the young man's fall. Interestingly, the important event is left until the end of the second sentence in line six: we're told that "an evening of gin is a good anaesthetic" before we're told he "smacks the concrete". The gritty consonants of the verb and noun register the painful jolt, but then more anaesthetic is applied. "He'll get home" is reassuring. Syntax mirrors psychology. Someone who falls over in public scrambles up quickly and tries to give the impression nothing has happened. The long, free-flowing lines of the poem help this continued effect of smoothing things over. Feminine endings are a recurrent characteristic of its music, and while there's no direct rhyme, faint echoes soften the edges of words like "anaesthetic", "spreadsheets", "credit".

Before the city boy gets to his feet in line 16, the poem expands on its gentle phantasmagoria. Money becomes a dream, a property of the subconscious. In a rapid alchemy, the abstract and seeming opposites "work and lust" are transmuted into "metal and paper" – money at its most tactile. Spreadsheets certainly can look like flattened office blocks, and in the poem they build them, nocturnally and in secret – "Even after closing time..." They also build up "credit that creates the pavement to land on", furthering the earlier thought that for the city boy, the concrete and the dream of money are one. Numbers themselves behave like lovers; they "whisper to each other, transact and multiply".

"The drunken city" suggests collective amnesia: perhaps others are about, in a condition similar to that of the protagonist, but agreeing not to notice. "The sober city" goes to work as usual the next morning, determined "to keep it happening". Somehow, the two patterns of behaviour are interdependent. Although it avoids the crude cliche of money as religion, the poem uses parallelism here, and skims a biblical lexicon in phrases like "got up and walked" and words like "faith" and "trust". This element of incantation recalls the last stanza of Philip Larkin's Money: "I listen to money singing … It is intensely sad."

A familiar synecdoche operates in terms like "the city" and "money". The particularity of "what we are and where we're tender" makes effective contrast, and insists on private resonance. The word "tender" is nicely ambiguous, and takes us beyond bruised flesh to the emotionally tender spots.

Almost casually the poem yokes the negative and positive effects of the money, part of which is love, and the love, of which part is money. There's a new development, or emphasis, in conclusion. The earlier narrative concerned one person's fall and rise. Now we have "buildings and people standing up, or falling down". If the idea of a financial crash has hovered earlier, it seems more sharply evoked here. The image could suggest a cataclysm beyond the economic. We have no choice, however, but to trust the "harness" of exchange mechanisms woven from, and for, ourselves.

The voice remains calm and dreamy. City Boy has an argument, but it is didactic rather than polemical, a poem that takes no sides and draws no lines. There's not even a suggestion that we should render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. The denarius, after all, had a human face.

City Boy

In a moment of love I caught a sense of money
and how they make it, and make it up. That city boy,
comfortable and sharp in a suit that fits him,
steers through the station when the city bars have closed,
and an evening of gin is a good anaesthetic
when he trips and smacks the concrete. He'll get home,
he'll recover in the faith that the concrete
is his dream of money: work and lust
made into metal and paper, made into numbers
that whisper to each other, transact and multiply.
Even after closing time, spreadsheets
are building up office blocks, and credit
that creates the pavement to land on.
I saw the drunken city exercise discretion, and
the sober city dream of how to keep it happening.
I watched the city boy get up and walk. I felt how this money
is part of us, and keeps ourselves within it. Some of it
has to be love, what we hope and where we're tender.
All we have is trust for it to care for us, curse us
and keep us in harness, to work for something in a city
made out of buildings and people standing up, or falling down.