The old pub on the corner lost beneath a motorway junction; stands

in a similitude of snow now. Its windows are gone the way

Of the church spire from whence the müezzin calls a different faithful to prayer

The bronze statue of an eminent Victorian child abuser

Glowers over what was once his property, his factory, his people

There is wet snow in the air.

 

My nose smells the cold which crawls inside my coat like seeping water;

My shoes are beginning to let in so I try to hurry for the bus shelter

Where an old lady sits neatly, handbag clutched, terrified

Of this new world order

 

She smiles shyly in my direction then quickly lowers her head

She probably wishes I was a woman, or dead

Some teenagers on the opposite side of Regent Road roar and rap

Fall against plate glass windows protected by noisy metal shutters

 

On scraps of common land kids from the flats kick a football repeatedly.

Silent JCBs squat like dinosaurs inside their metal cages, their grunting and tearing of the earth finished for the day

Tons of mush and rubbish is piled up agaist the walls of derelict buildings

Shielding the entrance to underworld garages for the rich.

Parking spaces blossom outside the 24/7 booze stores.

A girdle of neon outside these bastions of the money economy

There are no political posters sprouting from no crumbling walls

Some large plastic poppies remain scattered randomly on waste land

But the people who once lived here are long dead.

 

There are no monuments to those

Who turned the wheels of Cottonopolis for so-many years

Even their graveyards are blighted

Here we have public squalor and private despair squatting down together for the night

There's no going back. The S's and the K's are at each others' throats again

Drugs, prostitution, extortion, you name it

Nobody notices the dreary weather - they are not here for that

They worship in the temple of the BMWs

Which nose forward like suspicious dogs;

Sniffing out what's really always there:

A ferociously focused lack of gentility.