Tag Archives: poetry

PEAKY DISTRICT,
(WAGON ROAD)

was watching
Alfie and Tommy,
Jew and Gypsey
butt gangster
heads
   navigating their way
through Oswald Mosley
visions of
a future that could not
be more pure

there is an Auschwitz there
somewhere buried
in the heart
zombie
         brain
   of every true
     self-devouring European

and my Mother
wanting to wash off every
connection
    to Wagon Road Northern working class
abject poverty

cannot let any
trace of Romany stain
those
   lily white sheets

and my father sometimes
coming over proto-Nazi
with neat, nice
line
  in anti- semiticism
(even TS Eliot
never plunged so far
     down into the Styx of
full-on
political unconscious)

and me here grinding ny teeth
as the syllables spit bullets

going full AK
full Molotov

bury me in red flag, crimson
shroud
    so close to the grave

on that beach Alfie and Tommy
caught up in some deeply
personal
     ideological cross-
fire

this
the street history we
were never taught in school