Tuesday, 25 February 2025

nights in a small town

 nights in a small town


the evenings were always cold

dark and cold chip-shop hot-chrome bound

long-walked yellow-lamped dull-damp 

beating at the street corners as a

cat or dog would mark its territory with

the presence of loud conversation 

raucous laughter slag-stone black-capped it all

running with the pouring of steamed laugher 

out of the pub’s side door clad in nicotine 

lamp-sad dead-black closed chapels

dark side lanes where things could have poked

the lad’s bravado moon-hung bright-smiled

unknowing that they did not know

how they walked the timelines

as fixed as the train lines that spoke

sometimes in their fading away there

a few sad windows to highlight the falling

of chimney smoke upon the pavements

in flagstone quarried from the past

doleful the countenance of everything 

streetwise but ignorant of any chances 

that might lurk around the corner

of a life in dark-times long-nights pale-dawns

and the bloody awfulness of it all

lost in in the manic guffaws of the damned

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