Poetry
Issue #2
Metro Link
Plastic-bagged, rain-coated hoards would cross
That girded bridge over towards the inner city
Light battered through the interstices
Into the tram careening
Often too fast in the rush of air pressure
Between passing carriages
Shuttled over desert grasses
Cornbrook, Pomona
Suspended, elevated, shot into, exeo
Through wasteland, an always already undone
Sun ever setting red glorious and bleeding,
Place of rock barriers, barbed wire routes,
Canal dreck heaps, fish suspended gills up
Lone fisherman baited by local youths
In a carriage barked to through tin speaker, herded
Between squat G-Mex, spectral Beetham
‘A Cut Above’, massy slice of target
To affiliate with those looking and looked at
Consumers busy about their capital world
Those hoards would go to Lethe
To forget that bleeding sun, Castlefield red
The many mills gentrified or derelict
Engels’s desk long-vacated
Peterloo cold under the town-planned
Wasteland with soot in its soil
Leached and leaching,
Fallow for generations to come