Wednesday 29 January 2014

What became of the midlands

Coal courses through my veins
Blood as black as oil
Run through my engines
Cogs and pistons
Machines ticking over in my soul.

My skin is red
Covered in hard ground dirt
Black country
Fiery pits
Dark riven ploughed earth.

This is the heart of all industry
Once so proud, once so alive
People with a purpose
Working
To keep these furnaces ablaze.

Now canals that once flowed
Stand still and stagnant with scum
Flecks of russet
Deep seated in my chains and rotors
Infect them with rust.

Drawing slowly to a halt
The machines grow silent
Wiped away
In the rush of the clean, easy, money
Of the jobless elite.

As industry dies
So too do the midlands.

23/01/2014
S J Menary

Unrealistic expectations

Land of canals
And hard-ground dirt
Of wayward shopping trolleys
Drowning in black-green waters

It pulls us down with it
The youth of this industrial wasteland
Sucked in
To the soulless grind

Of kwicksave and poundland
Of council whitewash
Graze-your-knee pebbledash
And payday loans

Dreams dash against
The beer can playing-fields
And fall upon deep-scarred school tables
Etched with the names of those long gone

All the while
Cameron tells us
You too
Can have a Cambridge degree.

S J Menary
20/01/2014

Thursday 23 January 2014

It was...

It was unlike me,
It was highly unsavoury,
It was quite like thievery,
It was likely to result in discovery.

It was done on a quite night,
It was done when the moon was bright,
It was him that said it would be alright,
It was the plan to steal it outright.

We were caught red handed of course,
We were making our getaway on the back of a horse,
We were nicked stuffing diamonds down our trousers with force,
We are now filled with remorse.

I am applying for a divorce.

S J Menary
23/01/2014