Christmas Eve

Tonight, the Black Country is tinseled by sleet

Falling on little towns lit up in the darkness like constellations

The Pigeon, the Collier, and upon the shooting stars are boy racers

Who comet through the streets in white novas

It's blowing in drifts from the pit bank

Over the brown ribbon of the cut, over Beacon Hill

Through the lap-loved chimneys of the factories

Sleet is tumbling into the lap of the plaster-cast Mary

By the manger at St. Jude's

Her face gorgeous and naive as the last Bilston Carnival Queen

In the low-rise flats, opposite the cemetery

Mrs. Shole is turning on her fibre-optic tree

And unfolding her ticket for the rollover lottery

"Though we ain't never had a bit of luck in our lives"

And upstairs, in the box rooms of a thousand semis

Hearts are stuttering and minds unraveling like unfinished knitting

And the sleet fattens and softens to snow

Blanking the crowded rows of terraces

And their tiny hankies of garden, white now

Surrendering their bird feeders and sand pits

The shed Mick built last autumn when the factory clammed up

And the work's gone again

And the old boys are up at dawn to clock on nowhere

Sit walk their dogs, and sigh at the cars

Streaming to call centres and supermarkets

Because there ain't nothing in it that's

Man's work, really barbed their eye

But it's coming down now, really coming

Over the stands at the Molineux

Over Billy Wright kicking his dreams into the ring road

And in the dark, behind the mechanics

The old fiend, his boy, props his BMX against the lock-ups

And unzips to piss a flower into the snow

"Well, give me strength, Lord, to turn the other cheek

For we're the only ones halfway decent round here"

And the tower blocks are advent calendars

Every curtain pulled to reveal a snow-blurred face

And it's Christmas soon, abide it or not

For now the pubs are illuminated pink and gold

The Crooked House, more Pardoes, The Struggling Man