on route to the swansea vale on a sunday morning

on route to the swansea vale on a sunday morning 

one foot after the other foot after the other on

the steel-frosted sleepers parsing dawn’s progress 

to the vale works smoking sedately in the distance

on a sunday morning after a statuary night out with the boys 

so cold and overhung in step after step into the warm

innards of the work’s entrails of hot pipes and

furnaces and catalytic converters

vanadium pentoxide tasting of stale beer to

my bleary mind’s eye rehydrated by canteen tea 

and a corned beef sarni half now half later

when the trembling works of my gut has settled to the

morning’s work and the lab report’s blank boxes are filled

the tests tested the walkways walked the ingredients 

of all the processes processed and passed fit for

mechanical consumption by a poet’s rime upon

the scorched parchments of a works growling and

coiled to decapitate the caliphate of commerce gone to

earth on the walk home past the marshalling yards

where thought is shunted into the trucks of toil and 

a pay packet is too thin pillow for a bed of regret