Gang HQ

homeless love-nest

lamented commune

squatter’s delight

unlit by night

old house, old house,

abandoned two-up, tumbledown

A squabble of kids

echoes on damp sobbing walls

and a bus sighs to a stop

The paper shop bells customers

and a wounded crow speaks

of long-dead generations

Tatty nud-book pages

flick the redundant breeze

That frays twitching taffeta, lace and voile

on shattered panes

 and searches for nothing

finding plenty of it

on fusty floors

and in the broken Belfast sink

Patinated doors

keeping nothing in or out

The soot-piled hearth

has only memories

of hissing gas fires

like burnt ribs -

and coal-glowing children

getting ready for bed

But no

Not a skerrick

haunts the puckered rugs

tea-stained mugs

or dead-flower jugs;

nor the wax-papered shelves,

cellar-head delves

or broken bakelite darkness

Only select, vagrant,

or adventurous noses know

these vitreous odours

plank-soaked like sticky pub carpet;

or the whiff of fire-black floors -

or paper-damp, cabbage-cum-drain

honk and rubbish niff

Strange lonesome air stagnates

by rubbed-grubby

glossed embossed wallpaper

hanging ignored

by bulb-less purple flex

Lead pipe thieves leave lino scars

to fray by the wasp-strewn casement

beyond whose glassy gape, smashed slate

 litters beyond the gate and

EL OFF the wall declares

above the candle-matched cellar

The broken-latched

spider-netted, mushroom-damp

hosts broken butterflies

flittering for flowers

trapped behind the grey-green glass

And newspapers, stinking,

lay unread

since nineteen sixty-something

And no.

No bum shuffles

across the black-polished arm-chair

and no eyes scan the street

for a visitor

or even just some solace

in passing feet