This dark poem, submitted in response to this week’s Poetry Rehab prompt, Place, https://wordpress.com/read/post/feed/31982590/900236150 , is about the river that runs through the small town in which I was born. It is set in the aspic of my dimming memories of a small English community blighted by industrial decay in the early 1980s, and may be somewhat lacking in geographical accuracy, but could easily still apply, sadly, to any such post-industrial town anywhere in the world today.

 

The River Biss

 

They call it Biss.

As if there were some joke in there

about never being able to step into it twice

or the L having long since fallen out.

Paradise lost.

*

Biss runs between concrete banks

along a concrete bed

around the Gateway Supermarket,

a car park, and the old cotton mill

no-one has bothered to pull down.

*

And you can

follow it along the concrete riverwalk

interspersed with newly planted trees

up or down stream.

*

Down to the run-down factory and the park

to ply the ducks with crumbs

or steer a toy boat about

with a remote control on the stagnant pond

or pay respect to the bird-crap wreathed

copper monument to the war dead,

worn greenish blue by acid rain,

*

Or upstream to the railway station

to catch your train out of town,

to the tune of pigs led to slaughter

and the smell of pork pies

wafting from the butcher’s shop nearby.

*

Biss runs through the blood

& it’s no wonder a punk girl now & then

harms herself with a razor-blade

to let the poison out.

It’s no wonder the streets are littered

with bodies, heads in plastic bags,

amidst discarded tubes of glue.

*

Attachment

needs a super-strong adhesive these days,

and lies only a spot of shoplifting,

a shady DIY shop counter,

or a dealer’s cool leather jacket pocket

away…

*

A church squashed between shops

is clogged with zonked out punks.

Cripples hobble hopeless and homeless

through pedestrianized zones.

*

‘There we all go,’ we think,

‘but for God’s grace, perhaps,

or a giro from the DWP.’