Describe a drowsy day in Accrington?
Well, the view from my terrace-end window
admits a junction lively with traffic;
the lights change like a fairground's in full flow,
a pallette of particoloured movement
as a profusion of vehicles stops,
patient on red, and restive on amber,
flying through on green to destinations
far and wide (but most nearby, like Burnley,
Blackburn, Rossendale, the Ribble Valley);
sleeker cars and boxlike busses, lorries,
the occasional wail of ambulance
and police car cutting through the tangle
of lives - industrious humanity
and its profligacy of purposes -
on their way to accidents and murders
tucked away up side streets and dull suburbs,
estates and cul-de-sacs and leafy lanes;
(for even sleepy Hyndburn has its crimes
and moral ambiguities played out
as episodes in life's soap opera);

trees - the local oak, the willow, the larch -
do much to mitigate this confusion,
interspersed at intervals by streetlamps,
stretching up above their canopy's green
on gunmetal stalks - ever-watchful eyes,
dull by day, sickly orange-glared by night;
and winking through this chaos of movement,
the gaudy signage of fast food shopfronts -
still compelling though the windows are dark -
a promenade of vinyl and plastic
advertising their limited menus
of chicken, curries, fries, kebabs, pizzas;

behind all of which, rising ominously,
the redbrick wall (local Nori, of course)
of the multi-storeyed carpark's facade,
like a barbican, an austere bastille
glowers down upon the grey, faced-stone walls
of its neighbour (a pub called the Castle,
ironically); it dominates the town,
abutting its nearly-vacant sibling,
(moribund now with its dreary parade
of empty windows and charity shops,
betting establishments and Poundland stores),
the cruciform arcade of the Arndale;

arching overall this, splicing the town
in half, the railway viaduct's knife-edge
cuts, with stern, imposing authority
across this immiserated landscape
like an axe through the Starmer's Guide, roughly
from east to west, its stonework blackened, stained
with centuries of graft and grime ingrained;

and from my window, every day, as now
I watch as trains worm their way across it,
tempting me to pack my bag, to escape
and flee for good this place i know too well,
a boondock i've spent my life entire in,
its maze of once-cobbled streets unfolding
like wrinkles up the slopes of this valley;

doldrum town, with its tragic heritage,
its factories repurposed into gyms
and offices, parks now desultory,
its galleries testament to a past
at odds with its moribund present
and precarious future, redundant
in a world that's changing all around it
like a river round an island redoubt,
leaving it increasingly a ghost-town;
only one where the ghosts go on living,
happily ignorant of their status,
yet resolute, vanishing in plain sight.

Poor Accrington, what must become of it?

See, on one hand still a-bustle with life,
the dream of relevance, activity
lending it illusory agency,
the hard-won, held, and harder to let go
sense of purpose, and prideful industry;
on the other, delusion triumphant,
its denizens presuming that purpose
is more than surface, deeper than ripple,
and not destined for redundancy, yet:
to meet the fate awaiting it, the doom
to come for every town like this one here
is the hell that's coming as Capital
first buys, breaks up then sells society.

What i see through my living room window -
the traffic, the trees, the shops and the pubs,
those once-important community hubs,
the Coppice and the railway viaduct,
the heritage in dusty museums,
our council's serial stupidities
writ in stone and concrete, in street and park,
in each egregious community theft
(public land sold off to private concern) -
is destined to be parcelled off, priced up,
turned to profit. We'll all become product
with Accrington sold, just another brand,
another anachronism, artless,
trading on former tragedies, glories,
the prostitution of local stories,
while the town dies, for want of love, heartless.