Openshaw Poems
by Michael Patrick O'Leary
URBAN RENEWAL
It’s a jungle out there.
Jungle sounds.
The damp echoing of a diesel’s klaxon.
Feline hiss of wet tyres.
It’s a jungle out there.
The pocked yard fills with oily pools.
A distant, unidentifiable irritant
Like a dentist’s unceasing drill.
A night like an aching tooth.
An eighty-year old woman is dying
In a state of siege.
Her body shrinks,
Eroded by insidious
Winds of time.
Her spirit dissolves
Imperceptibly into fog.
It’s a jungle out there.
Outside, a derelict wilderness
Gestates predatory creatures.
Loose bricks that once formed the homes
Of friends and family,
(Now dead or dispersed
In the diaspora of the downtrodden,
Disappeared by council decrees
Into spanking new slums in the sky)
Thud against her door
In the long threat
Of the night.
GHOSTS
A dog’s body
Is deficient for the challenge
Of a charging bus
And becomes mere matter
For the flies to kiss.
Mind over matter.
A dogsbody in the wireworks
Was crushed to matter
Under a toppled crane.
He didn’t matter to anyone much.
They didn’t mind
Getting another from the labour exchange
Didn’t mind sending some flowers.
The “purveyor of fine meats”
“Is pleased to meet you,
And has meat to please you”.
An ultra-violet insect repeller
Hums and gives out a purple glow
Like an undertaker’s neon sign.
A bluebottle settles with a
Cyclorrhaphous
Languor on a lamb carcass.
Among dripping cadavers of cows
And smaller pieces of mutilated animals
The butcher reads in his news paper
Of carnage and mayhem in Ireland
And frowns.
Reflections of derelict houses
Mingle with sample headstones
In the funeral director’s window.
He’ll always do a good trade here.
Old people steal
From the social to put money by
To be respectably buried.
Crepuscular purple light
Casts a mortuary pallor
On crumbling streets,
Where generations of spirits were stunted.
Strips of brown wallpaper
Flap in the spiteful twilight.
A dead armchair still bears the greasy
Imprint of some Brylcreamed pate
That now may be a hollow skull
Growing weeds.
Green weeds and dandelions
Sprout stubbornly
Where hungry childhood died into vicious
Querulous old age.
Human spirits become carrion
For voracious vegetation.
What a carry on!
How do they carry on?
Why do they carry on?
The street names here
Give a frisson if you have read
Beyond Belief.
Years ago, when there was some kind of life
In these houses,
Hindley and Brady trod these pavements,
Carrying in their minds
The unthinkable,
Seeking children to torture.
Do the ghosts of their victims
Socialise with the factory-maimed?
Do they compare and contrast
The respectable and bureaucratic
Mutilations
With the perversion that sickens us all?
RELICS
Old stomachs rumble
Behind watchchains.
Time is buried in linty recesses
Of brown serge.
Old minds, stifled
In shiny brown wallpaper
Fade beneath flat caps.
On Thursday morning
The pillar box
Is so certainly scarlet
Outside the Post Office.
Old women, pension books
Slimmer by another order,
Arthritically finger their change,
Reckoning the chances
Of buying one more week.
WAKES WEEK
Throughout this first day of almost summer
They have poured out of their
Dark and dusty terraces.
In Abbey Hey park
The old and the halt,
The wage slaves and the petty clerks,
The jobless and the feckless,
Have tried to enjoy
The blue but airless sky.
In Abbey Hey park
Young women on leave from Atora,
Tresses lank from their work,
Faces pustuled from the suet
Usurping their sebum,
Broiled gently under the low flame of the sun.
A young mother in a short skirt,
Exposed shins mottled and marbled,
Brindled like brawn
By her winter fires.
She hoped the sun’s blessing would heal
Her flesh, erase the purplish yellow
Shadow about her cheekbone.
Pale sandy- haired children have
Smeared their faces
With Mr Softee
And fingered the old dog turds
Baked white in the sunshine.
In Abbey Hey park
Hennaed women offered
Varicose veins in benediction
To the heavens.
The sun is a glob
Of phlegm
Hawked westward from the
Rubber works
Slithering down
The greasy sky
Over the suet factory.
As the sun sets
In the mad alien fire of the
Polluted sky,
Women’s bodies sweaty and glowing
From the heat of a long day,
Freed from imprisoning foundation
Garments flounder and slide
Across plastic sofas
Draped with laddered tights.
Laughing hips flop
In defiance of loosened girdles.
As the sun descends to its nadir
In the now infernal sky,
Dentures are abandoned
To swim or sink
In pint mugs of water.
They grin back at their owners
In a rictus saying, “You’ve got to laugh”;
And “Mustn’t grumble”;
And”Tomorrow’s another day”;
And “As long as you’ve got your health”;
And “You don’t have to be mad to work here”;
And “We’ll all be pushing up daisies one day”.
Padraig Colman 