Where mills made largely of lead
snuff out your phone signal as fast
as an all-seeing foreman,
where midnight footfall
three houses down
sounds like intruders in your home,
where what I thought was the shadowy clatter of hooves,
threatening to lend more furlongs to the dark,
was a paint tin rolling in the street,
where the scene of Lowry’s The Chapel
looks even more ‘down at heel’
now weed-clogged, cracked and chapel-less,
where, on a hill, a church bell
hungers, behind wooden slats, for every hour
to shake off festering bats,
where, although no one’s there, you feel
fists, or knives, waiting to meet you in anger,
throbbing in pockets of air,
where people still say the rain
carries radioactive traces,
landing on your head even as you watch
a hundred paper lanterns descend
delicately round a kink in the cloud
over a monument that honours the dead.