Street Dreams

Cherry

By Turlough

Sun, 23 Nov 2025
  • 113 reads
9 comments
 

 

Street Dreams

 

I smelt toxic dust clinging to sunshine

Frightening brightness that searing hot day

I smelt the dog’s fear in a forsaken street

Demolition site hoardings masked every movement

Except for the dog barking constant and mad

 

Industrial noise of a shot-blasted town

Smelt, never heard

Only the dog eternally barking

As angry as the rust that’s its home

I knew where I was the first time I went there

With them!

Who were they? And why?

One thousand and one unheard whys

In the great deafening silence since how long ago?

 

Hematite dust and scarlet heat

The blackened white noise of obscured destruction

As the dog in the street barks to its heart’s discontent

At the silent roar of Surt’s communal furnace

I’ve often returned

All alone in my darkness, except for the dog

The sun’s always shining, the scorched dust lingers

The same old scene with the same old smell

 

Last night uninvited I ventured back

Dragged by my mind for just one more look

In the street that’s my seat of nocturnal disturbance

The mad dog’s still barking

These six decades on

 

Image:

My own photograph of Middlesbrough’s iconic Transporter bridge.

 

 

Certificate 12
Poem
Poetry in Commotion
Surreal
Autobiography

Comments

Submitted by skinner_jennifer on

An insightful and passionate account Turlough. Your narrative describes the bleakness of this Industrial time back in our history.

Jenny.

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Thank you Jenny. Thanks for reading and for the comment.

Turlough

Submitted by GlosKat on

Here in the tiny Wiltshire village of Plovdiv, my next door neighbour is from Middlesborough.  When I first met her I thought her voice sounded like a Geordie accent.

I learnt something important that day.

Never, ever, call someone from Middlesborough a Geordie.

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Absolutely not. Our coloquial term is 'Smoggie'. My Nan (aka English Electric Grace) was from Sunderland which was much further up the coast from the 'Boro but she too would be outraged had she been smeared with the epithet 'Geordie'.

I was born in Middlesbrough and back in those days it still fell within the boundaries of the North Riding of Yorkshire until decimalisation came along and changed everything.

Turlough

Submitted by GlosKat on

Well in my defence can I say I’m from Southampton (In fact some of my family are from even further south, on the Isle of Wight).  So to me ‘Northerners’ start at Winchester and I tend to lump them all together

I know what you mean about the county boundaries.  My sister went from Yorkshire (East Riding) to Humberside in 1974 and back to Yorkshire again in 1996 - all without moving house.

I shall try calling my neighbour a 'Smoggie' (from a safe distance) and see what happens .

 

Submitted by Turlough on

My former brother-in-law was from Southampton and seemed to be oblivious to the existence of any other part of the island of Great Britain apart from Portsmouth, which he always referred to as DSC (Dog Shit City).

I loved the fact that Southampton existed as, having moved from the Northlands to Wiltshire, it was reassuring to know that there were places even further south than Chippenham, thus reducing the likelihood of me falling off the edge of the world.

The scientific geographic North of England begins at Northallerton, a town with a name derived from the Anglo Saxon words meaning ‘All towns above here are the North’. It’s about thirty kilometres south of Middlesbrough and any point further down the country from there can only be described as the South, which is something I used to say to annoy all those soft southern jessies in Leeds when I lived there.

Middlesbrough’s latitude, by the way, is 54.5° N which is higher up the world than some bits of Alaska, a place with which it shares many similarities but none of which I can remember off the top of my head.

Turlough

Submitted by GlosKat on

People from Portsmouth call people from Southampton 'scummers'.  

People from Southampton don't call people from Portsmouth anything because we like to pretend they don't exist.

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

This needs lots of reads! I looked up Surt, is your one the volcano? Vivid nightmare feel of being alone, like with "Demolition site hoardings masked every movement", and "Smelt, never heard / Only the dog eternally barking",
and the heat, with smelt/smelled, and repetitions of dust and the barking going on and on and on, unanswered, no comfort, water, softness, no place to be welcomed or to belong

that's a brilliant photo, to match

Great poem

 

Submitted by Turlough on

Thanks very much for that Di. I wasn’t sure whether it worked as a poem or not and dithered for a while over posting it. It didn’t take me very long to write so that made me think it probably wasn’t up to much. It didn’t take long to write because memories of the place are so vivid in my mind.

It’s sort of a true story. I remember going to that street as a kid and seeing everything that I’ve described in the poem. I don’t know why I went there or who took me but it’s something that’s always stayed with me. I had a dream about it soon afterwards and that dream has been constantly recurring throughout my life until as recently as Saturday night. On other occasions while we still lived there I remember walking past the end of the street with my mother and sister on the way to the town centre. So I know roughly where it is and Google Maps gives me the idea that it might have been Grange Road. We moved away from Middlesbrough when I was eight years old so it must have been in 1966 or earlier. I took the photograph about thirty years ago, which was the last time I went back there in real life.

Surt, as far as I am aware, was the king of fire in Norse mythology and those people he defeated in battle he always led into a huge furnace to burn for all eternity. A place that I would describe as the antithesis of a Donegal wood stove.

I really appreciated your comment. It seems you really got my drift.

Turlough