the estate

The house sat like an industrial wart in the middle of an estate.
Tyre empties huddled rats in the cold comfort they were accustomed.

Beside the sink they kept a plastic bin to collect used tea bags.
Scratchy little ticks ran up and down stubby knees.

The children’s names were mumbles, insignificant little shits
Who gathered around in clumps near the park and the street.

You could get a camel through the fathers intellect.
Beer heavy belly with an encyclopaedic knowledge of soaps.
He lounged in a desperate chair that had died and been re-stuffed.
Whilst his lady wife, a loose term for a careworn child bearer,
Lulled her dried elbows in a water lacking suds.

The curtains hung like suspicion in cobwebbed threads.
Dead flies gathered in a testament to unnecessary house work.

Milk bottles fell where the hen pecked child had spent them.
On dirty floors and under crusty seats and beside the cracked door.

A fug of cigarette smoke suspended like death above their knees.
Outside a rancid rodent of a dog ran barking bitter obscenities.

The wind trembled before blowing past the corroded window frames.
A car sat blind eyed and belligerent in a craze of beer crates.

You could gather starlight in the sordid stains that fled the floor.
Forgotten mail ran riot around the broken post box.
Forgotten meals grew green on pitted porcelain plates.

The threat of random violence collected in dusty adjectives.
Expletive high and pointless with a raised ham fist to frighten.

Sundays travelled like Mondays in a redundant haze.
A growing feeling of age old apathy hung brooding and black.

The distant voices of people didn’t intrude beyond the fence.
Television had killed without malicious intent the need for speech.
Just grunts and nods that escaped dry lips and thin heads.
Life began at somewhere where the money went but not here.