There's No Place Like...

i) Home: Town

North Road, Thomson Street, fish-and-chips, rain:
Firth Moor and Redhall, money down the drain
Pease St, Penn St, Victorian-terraced crime
South Park, graffiti’d, bandstand falling down.
Greenbank, the hospital, the benefit flats
Behind the doors of Albert Road
The secrets women keep:
Families on the margins
Dogshit in the street.

Skipping ropes are gone now, a car park’s on the green,
the shops are on the bypass, the church is multiscreen.
The Dun Cow and White Horse, boarded up and closed
and every week a sushi bar: Emperor’s new clothes.
Twenty buses on every route where no-one wants to go;
and the town is surely dying:
homeless in the doorways;
moondogs on a string.

ii) Home: Thoughts from Abroad
(Kipling’s Grandchildren)

If you were born in a piece of pink,
that country’s changed its name
and you’ve got a British Passport,
but can’t say where you’re from.
Toddling through the Rhineland
and teenaged East of Suez;
you’re troubled in a boarding school,
somewhere must be home.
Later you get restless
for something you can’t name.
So you dig out your old suitcase
and take the shilling too,
another uniform outpost
- there’s nothing else for you.

iii) Home: Not Dry

‘And where do you come from?’
‘That’s really, really complicated.’
I wish I knew is left unstated.

And yes, the stranger takes it wrong:
‘English, Scottish, Irish, what?’
I’d like to say I’m a Hottentot.

‘You know, it’s just been so-o long…’
I take a slug; it’s Spanish beer,
then just tell him, ‘I’m local here.’