"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that." Bill Shankley.

The morning rain soaks my clothes, my hair, my skin,

I do not care. For I am  not here: nor there, nor anywhere

I look at the mortar between the crumbling bricks in this old

Wall built by the calloused hands of these men who’d served

On the Somme. Who’d been called ‘such dirty scabs’

In 1929 by the striking Salford dockers. They’d hung their heads

But they’d had mouths to feed. They’d taken any work they could.

They’d carved their initials and the date 1929 on the granite bridge

That took them over to Quaker fields where kicking a soggy football

Had helped them forget their empty bellies, if only for a while.

Now young kids smoke skunk here, the sweet smell is always here,

 

Hanging heavy as the air. Their great grandfathers used Laudanum,

That concoction of opium and alcohol, then still rife, despite the law:

There is always resistance, many ways to make a stand 

And to imagine that there could be more. So much fucking

more.