Here in the home of smoke and smog, my hometown grey,
heirloom of mines, the steam and the fog, where evening plays
on the moorland spine to colliers’ paces
and the northern wind that weathered their faces
still gnarls in the teeth of the two a.m. frost;
here where tomorrow is always lost
in the death of the streetlamps hung in their hats,
their spluttering, fizzling, last-rite laughs
like the dark psalms stammered in the vestry’s dusk;
here where communion no longer tolls, where cathedral musk
is a godless ghost beneath ten dead bells,
and the cold throat belfry is an old-shack-shell
for the alleyway hobo in his passing breath,
and his cat which brims on the edge of death;
here where the fieldlamp’s first candled flame
is its last, and the quarry’s trace, a stain
over skin, casts the shadow of a grieving face,
(the memento mori of this town), this dead grey place
where the factory black is the cradle we sing to,
the sack where we sleep is the home that we cling to,
only here come here to the city’s dark heart,
only here come here to the tubes in its arms,
the industrial crack, these towers of ash,
where we think of the poverty coffins we’ll have.