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