Hello Humber Gateway,

you old dock drab,

winking at passing commerce

with your ample warehouse acreage,

welcoming skirts hitched

up the legs of the Ouse and Trent.

 

Under stretched skies,

I am a salmon swimming the sixty-two,

past rotting coal fired corpses,

where orderly pylons queue the lanes,

sturdy girls whispering indiscretions;

gossip from a shabby adolescence.

 

On a three-quarter empty train,

I see the summer poet watching ghosts

play in the cinders of railway sidings,

silhouetted sentinels standing by;

cranes rooted by stagnant water

and gently rusting Tom Pudding hoists.

 

Down breeze block back lanes

and brick pond waste lands,

kids test the friction of bare skin

in the canopies of scaffolding,

while mad dogs howl unseen

from the depths of dark houses.

 

And why am I compelled to return,

revisit this corroded dock salvage,

resurrect this east coast accent

from a time that rips open my chest

and causes these scales to fall?

I wonder if it’s a salmon thing

 

or just a Goole thing.