Two-up Tumble-down
Gang Head Quarters
homeless love-nest
lamented commune
Derelict delight
unlit by night
old house, old house,
abandoned two-up, tumbledown
Outside a bus sighs
and a squabble of kids
echoes on damp sobbing walls
And across the roman run-rigged road
the paper shop bells customers
for fudge, fags, and fancy goods
Back by the damp-stunk board-creak hut
tattered nude mags flicker
in titty winds, and
Slates above, cling to rotting dreams
where wounded crows
speak of long-dead generations
That redundant breeze
frays twitching taffeta,
lace and voile,
snagging on shattered panes
And searches for nothing
on fusty floors
and honking in the broken Belfast sink
Patinated doors
keep the nothing in or out
And the soot-piled hearth
has only memories
Of hissing gas fires;
their burnt ribs replace
the coal-glowing furnace
where children
got ready for bed
Not a skerrit
haunts the puckered rugs
tea-stained mugs
or dead-flower jugs
The wax-papered shelves,
down cellar-head delves
Into broken, bakelite darkness
Only vagrant noses know
these vitreous odours
Plank-soaked, sticky black carpet,
or the fire-black, will O' the whiff floors
And the paper-damp, cabbage-drain
berp and honk of off-cast, mutinous garments
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 door
kicked in and sagging
tearfully gazes at the
spidery net curtains; mushroom-damp
in fractured, gappy windows
Hosts of broken butterflies
that flittered in for flowers, are
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