Worn out
The old black iron fireplace
Cries out
As it emits smoke
From its billowing mouth
Roaring
Like an antiquated warhorse
It fumes
While the black cast iron
Hisses
And steams back
On a flat brass plate of spattered grease
Waiting
For its turn to slide along the old wooden ironing board

Stressed
And stretched
With ink powdered soot
Its tarnished brass pole is brazed above its fiery mouth
Here dishtowels entrails down
Like yellow rows of smoke stained teeth
Drying
Decaying
In the catarrhal heat of its reeking breath

A relic

That had now outlived

Its time

To cast off the old iron
Fart
In a new one
That is top of the art
Mottled cream
That does not fart
That tiles the fireplace
With the warmth
And freshness of a new baby’s heart
And let’s do the parlor too
Because it is clean
Pristine and new

Change

The gaslight
Into electricity
Pop in
A bob
For gas
Change
Had become
A meter of time
But the accumulator
Still turned
The pages of Mrs. Dales

Diary

In the Fifties

A dusty chestnut horse
With a dock of dust
Would saddle the street
With a rump of soot
Coal on the cart
Delivered
By a Suffolk Punch
Fossilized
With horse power

In harness
The dray rolled to a stop
The horse came to a halt
Reigned in
The horse and the dray truckled
Its power
To trucking

Coalman

Picked up their slack
Sacked
With the hump
Hunched on their back
Shadows silhouetted the back entry walls
Stooped
Burdened and bent with goal bags of lead
Down
Long common back entries of piss and shit
Spinal
Shadows
Of sable soot
Soiled their skin with streaks of sweat
Day after day
Dumping coal into stone shelters of black hole boxes

Aside

Shelters boxed
In the carbon shadows of the war
It sheltered light
While it blacked out death
Dating the darkness
Was to embrace life
Embodied
Under a kinship of blackness
Families huddled
Under the warmth of it’s dawning
Light
Was locked
Into a sheltered black box
A timeless capsule
Storing its monolithic shadow
Into a metamorphic fossil of cryogenic

Life

In the Fifties

Returned
Garbage to the corporation
Trucks
Dun and dusty
Idling
In a defile of refuge
Blue bottled fly’s buzzed and squatted
Into a depository of depreciation
While dogged dusty dustman
Pulled burrowing bins from it’s stoned
Shitty sheath of hibernation
Edged with steel
The pestilent bin is ousted out of its black box cave
Leaving
A rancid orifice of empty light

Dustman

Onto the shoulder
The bin men bear their burden
Resting
On strength
Shoulder blades are sheaved with leather
Aprons
Befriend a film of foul and filth
Humped
With stench
His day his drooled with dust and dirt
Chained
In an armor of ash
Brushing the back entry
With a mane of dust
Brushing you off
As he tramps
Tramps tramps tramps
Down a never ending corridor of
Shit shit shit
Spinal
Shadows
Of dun dust
Soiled their skin with streaks of sweat
Day after day
Dumping garbage into a dumpster of darkness
Garbage
Eclipsed dustmen
Passing
Each other
Trudging down endless entries of humanity
Back and forth
Disparaging his burden
Into a faceless wall
He would write his ambulatory

Entry

My Old Man’s a Dustman

August 11, 1960
Life’s waste
Spills into shit
While piss pours
Down the gutter
Life drains
Into a sewer of vulgarity

By Lonnie D

Entry

My Old Man’s a Sanitary Engineer

August 11, 2001
Refuse
Life’s garbage
Is the wanton wasteland
Of soiled humanity
Return
Its wanting womb
To wanting fertility
Recycle and reuse

By Donegan L

Our Entry

Bright
And light
Clean and green
Aquamarine
Isolated
Six tight arsed veterans
Together
Side by side
Mooning the prefabs
With their cheek to cheek
Bricked backside

Walls
Of polished privets faced our red bricked backyard

Walls

Hedged with heads of heady
Green
Corridors of bottle green
Leaves
Tussled bustled
And rustled for light
Waves
Of breezes paused
And poured over gulping green privets
Shivering
In a shower of shade
They stood tall under the shadow of our backyard

Walls

Of sweet-smelling scents
Tossed their bouquet
To a welcoming sun
This short entry was sweet in verdure
Were vegetables grew
Behind a prefab door
Flowers bloomed
In an orifice of shit
Our little back entry was a misfit
It was a country lane
In a corridor of gray
Our back entry wall blushed
With the dawn of a new day

Six war torn terraced veterans

Muster
Their dustbins
Incited
For insertion
Accountable
For accumulation
Accredited for
Disposing
Defiled deposits of degradation
Into a depository of depressed decay
Walled up
With pride
Inserted for
Instillation
All bins
Lined up
With decorum
All was pristine
On our side
Of our back wall