Poem

My home town

My home town is new to me.
It doesn’t mean a thing to me –
the streets don’t have that home town ring,
the musical beat that speaks to me.

Because my heart’s not here.
I left it behind somewhere
in the diesel dazzle of the city haze,
I lost it down the crazed cracks of the battered concrete,
or I misplaced it on the tube,
between Tottenham Court Road and London Bridge.

My home town lies in a green dish,
cloaked by clear, clean, soaring skies.
Baize covered black crests rise
over the de-industrialised dregs of bricks and mortar,
cleansed and de-humanised, where wasted slag
sloshes in the bargain basement seam
of pound shops.

Sun twinkles on the emerald shards of broken bottles,
the silver of empty lager cans glints in the beck –
amber water gushes, unsoiled, unspoiled,
as it chuckles away.

My home town has youth crime,
and teenage mums and childhood obesity,
petty delinquency, alcohol and drug dependency.
It has no diversity, no multi cultural, multi faith ethnicity.

My home town cries out for picks and shovels,
sweat and steam and that gold sable seam,
so human beasts of burden may hack their way
to dirty dignity –
the worthless jobless wait in job centres
and doctors surgeries for the black old, bad old times
to redeem them,
to set them to crawl in muck and filth.

I wait for my heart to drag itself here,
to my home town.

Pj Buchanan
Crook, Durham

Pj recently moved to County Durham from Bristol. She has an MA in Creative Writing, has lead workshops for children, young people, and for women. She also has a Certificate in Counselling Skills. Pj has performed as Poetry Jack at Glastonbury Festival, Manchester Pride amongst others.

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