A Stirring biomass, a grim river
Garrotted by mud and each rusted carcass
Dumped over the slow years -
'And we saw the metal of a woman,
A frothy corruption, naked and open,
we prised her from the mire, and saw the city
through the eyes of the sewer,'
The Lady from sludge,
your toady skin broke
as you flopped, nymph-like on board

Caved-in by the tumbling sky,
And air like leather. Dry in the throat.
The sweating walls spun his head,
And the cogs whirred to fast
To bite back. Space and time-blind,
He turns to the sepia city.
Like new life,
ready for the fall of man.

Through the river of time elapsed,
Churning up memory.
And there's the glitz, the cracking lips.
that bet on goodness.
'I remember being a girl - and my mother -
smiling but never sad -
I waited for her every morning'.

The forgotten root scratches out life
Underneath vast and forgotten hangers.
The lungs of the city shed their skin
To keep pace with the smog.
See what we all don't know.
And live where we all can't see.
He led her to a room with broken windows
and one swinging bulb,
She wasn't scared.

Dank Amazon.
the roots are wires,
sprawling for grip for the sulking trees
In the great ape eco-system
'I'm a cruel joke, don't you see?'
As her eyes slowly rolled.
'I'm sorry'
As her fists unclenched
'Im Sorry'
As her knees went limp
'I'm Sorry'

Belted by un-silent night
And below gridlocks of light
An I.C.1 male is being chased
By screaming vans, run rabbit
Down the hole and off you go.
And the hiss of 'one eight seven,
one eight seven' from the radio,
is scoring his run - as the pools on the floor,
neon-flashed burst open
in a booted shatter.

'And the time went by,
And I looked at your form
And I looked at your cuts
And you are the river
And one of its secrets, un-watered'.

Trudging along, a weary man feels the molten earth **** him in
and take the stress away from another footstep .
The soaking sun and broad horizon are the insurmountables
And its neither hot nor cold, on this mud road, just long.
Over peaks, troughs and snow and storm.
On rain through desert, on plain and thunder.
Anno dommini and after.
The shade from trees planted on the road and the fruit they bare.
Respite, but will be picked and rot.
And the earth will **** him in. One footstep at a time.

In here a groan rises as a mist,
a guttural prayer
in coughed blood.
The candlelight whispers
an unutterable secret
on every rafter.

Heaving over
his leaden spine
he wonders when does death become
something breathtaking.

And not a voyage back somewhere he knows,
as he thinks
to a picture
of England

that bore him a son and wife
And every Friday night at the Red Lion
And darts and a pint.
And his rifle.

He saw god once in his child
and once in a French field hospital
as a man with metal red spit
lain on his back.

Crooked bones, coal, steel,
clanking and deafened with laboured breath,
that heaves up and hacks out as we crawl
and ache and sort and hunch and collect our
black diamonds, as we mine down,
down the rocks and the darkness until we can erupt into the sun
like worms haggard with dust and rot and breathe. Again.
As each vertebra recoils from being wound tight.

We are the pit.
The ancient shapes in the Davey lamp
chiselled from the coal itself.
And the song in our voice
is hammers and dynamite.
We will be here,
always,
under your feet.